By Anastasia Tubanos, theWHIR.com
September 5, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — US telco giant Comcast (comcast.com), one of the more vocal players in the “net neutrality” debate, has announced on Thursday it is appealing the Federal Communications Commission’s order to stop blocking peer-to-peer traffic.
According to reports on Associated Press, Comcast challenged the decision in the US District Court of Appeals after the FCC voted three to two last month that Comcast’s practices violated a federal policy that guarantees unregulated access to the Internet.
The FCC also ordered the company to provide more information about its network-management practices within 30 days, reports IT Business Edge. Comcast says it has agreed to comply with this particular order.
David Cohen, Comcast’s executive VP, said in a statement to AP that the company is seeking “review and reversal” of the FCC order and that the commission’s action was “legally inappropriate and its findings were not justified by the record.”
Comcast was put in the hot seat after users complained that the telco was placing transfer limits on its bandwidth in an effort to ease the growing strain on its network caused, in particular, by peer-to-peer file sharing and technologies such as Bittorrent.
According to AP, the FCC called Comcast’s network management practices “discriminatory and arbitrary” and said the company’s practices “contravene industry standards and have significantly impeded Internet users’ ability to use applications and access content of their choice.”
In May, The WHIR reported that Comcast considered placing transfer limits on its Internet subscriber accounts.
Comcast has been one of the telcos deeply involved in the debate on “net neutrality,” the regulatory conversation in which carriers argue they should be allowed to prioritize traffic, or to charge content sites a premium for more reliable delivery of their content.
In an issue even more directly related to Bittorrent traffic, Comcast has been criticized for being one of a relatively long list of ISPs that either block or throttle Bittorrent traffic. The company has retracted its decision to block Bittorrent traffic outright, but is well noted for working against the massive bandwidth hit the software delivers.
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