The Federal Communications Commission this morning took the expected step of passing a cease-and-desist order for Internet service provider Comcast, which has persistently blocked or “throttled” peer-to-peer traffic using the Bittorrent protocol on its networks.
Mostly symbolic, the rule will likely be overturned on a court appeal, as the FCC has not been given formal authority to regulate how ISPs handle their traffic. However, it should help to bring a long-contested issue to a head.
P2P traffic is often blamed for clogging the Internet, slowing traffic for most users. A narrow subset, usually estimated to be 5 percent, shares massive amounts of information. Considering that many people just use the Internet to check email or read the news, the fact that others are dominating traffic isn’t surprising. But the unspoken argument for Comcast’s throttling isn’t the amount of data being swapped — it’s the legality.
It’s BitTorrent, after all, that made it easier than ever to illegally download copyrighted music, movies and other media. Which is why Congress yesterday passed its own P2P measure, part of an update to the Higher Education Act, to require universities to detect and prevent file-sharing on their networks.
Like the FCC decision, the new institutional rules are somewhat toothless, lacking any specified punishment for schools that ignore it.
However, the profusion of rules show that lawmakers will be persistent in trying to define the place of P2P sharing on the Internet. The result should be a better-defined status for BitTorrent, which will make companies more comfortable about deciding whether or not to build their own infrastructure atop it.
