FCC Enforcement of Net Neutrality in Comcast Case - nation’s largest network cable company

On Friday August 1st, the FCC voted 3-2 to uphold a complaint against Comcast, the nation’s largest network cable company, in light of a complaint launched by the Free Press, Public Knowledge, and Media Access Project. The complaint suggested the company was secretly degrading innovative protocols by illegally inhibiting some of its users of its high-speed Internet service from using popular file-sharing software. Almost a year ago a legal complaint was leveraged out of Philadelphia against Comcast. The complaint is related to BitTorrent software which is commonly used by people downloading various media files such as movies, television shows, music files, and software.

Small portions of their customer database who utilize BitTorrent have a tendency to consume a very large amount of network capacity, which in essence degrades access to other customers. In reaction, Comcast attempted to install equipment which slowed, but not completely blocked the file transmissions of high capacity users.