FCC Chair Pushes for Comcast Censure - Page 2

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Should Comcast score a victory in court over the FCC's authority to enforce the principles, it still could face trouble ahead when the new Congress convenes, Levin wrote.

Net neutrality legislation -- largely a partisan issue -- has never come close to passing either the House or the Senate, despite several attempts. At present, there are two Net neutrality bills in the House and one in the Senate.

Yet the issue could be taken up with renewed zeal by a likely Democratic Congress, Levin said.

Even if the next Congress remained deadlocked on the issue, the agency could move to shore up its own authority on network management enforcement, he added in his note.

That would mean that it would put the FCC's Internet service principles -- or something close to them -- through a formal rulemaking procedure.

That task that would be made considerably easier in a Democratic administration with an FCC that "may openly support network neutrality," Levin wrote.

Mum on quality-of-service side deals

One significant point excluded from Martin's draft order was the question of Comcast brokering quality assurance agreements with individual companies.

Earlier this week, Comcast announced a deal with Internet phone provider Vonage to work together on "reasonable network management."

Net neutrality proponents have long been warning against a scenario where Internet companies would feel compelled to begin negotiating deals with ISPs to ensure that their traffic is delivered quickly over the various networks.

That, they argue, would be a recipe for a decidedly non-neutral Internet, and Free Press was quick to express its concerns.

"We are baffled as to why it was necessary for Vonage to strike a network management agreement with Comcast to guarantee that their services are not degraded or blocked," Free Press' Ammori said in a statement. "Such anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices are already against the law."

Comcast claims that it's not that simple.

In March, the cable giant announced that it was moving toward a policy of protocol-agnostic network management, which meant that traffic from peer-to-peer services such as BitTorrent would be subject to the same speed limits as every other transmission.

[cob:Special_Report]But managing the flow of packets affects different types of transmissions in different ways. A video download, for instance, has a much higher tolerance for latency that a video stream. Likewise, the quality of an Internet phone call sinks quickly if certain data packets hit speed bumps when traveling over the network.

Comcast's announcement to make its network management protocol-agnostic by the end of the year came amid intense pressure from the public-interest groups and the specter of regulatory inquiry.

While the move positioned Comcast as not targeting a single type of traffic, the question of how a protocol-agnostic approach would mesh with latency tolerances of different transmissions remains unanswered.

But the FCC's Kenny said that the commission's proposed draft order was limited to Comcast's traffic blocking and subscriber notification policies, leaving the issue of side deals off the table for the time being.