Federal regulators are planning to meet on Friday and declare that Comcast violated Net neutrality principles when throttling BitTorrent traffic on its network. This would become the U.S. government's first Net neutrality-related ruling.
There's just one problem with the Federal Communications Commission's plans: They may not be quite, well, legal. In other words, the FCC may not actually have the authority to make its ruling stick.
In 2006, Congress rejected five different bills, backed by groups including Google, Amazon.com, Free Press, and Public Knowledge, that would have handed the FCC the power to police Net neutrality violations. Even though the Democrats have enjoyed a majority on Capitol Hill since last year, their leadership has shown zero interest in resuscitating those proposals.
It's true that the FCC adopted a set of principles in August 2005 saying "consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice." But the principles also permit providers' "reasonable network management" and, confusingly, the FCC admitted on the day of their adoption that the guidelines "are not enforceable."
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