According to comments made by an official at the FCC recently, new rules that will stop internet service providers from interfering with some applications and the free flow of information over their broadband networks are to be proposed by the head of the FCC.
Although no formal announcement had been made yet, the anonymous official advised that proposals for the rules would be made by Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications commission, during a speech at the Brookings Institution, which is a Washington think tank.
Support for Internet neutrality, which is the equal treatment of traffic over the internet, had been pledged by Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and these new proposals would uphold this. The blocking or slowing of any content or particular services running across the broadband networks of service providers like AT&T, Verizon Wireless or Comcast would be prevented by these new rules.
Many of the major service providers offer services like cable TV on their networks and a number of consumer watchdogs are concerned that without strict rules in place to ensure Net neutrality many of the communications companies could interfere with content like streaming TV shows, which they consider to be competition.
The need to ensure that the broadband connections of their users are not slowed down by applications that take up a lot of bandwidth on their network has been the main argument from many of the service providers who against any regulations that prevent them from managing their own network.
The editor of the DSL Prime broadband industry newsletter, Dave Burstein said “This is about whether I can turn off my cable TV and watch TV over the Internet. Comcast cares about this because they don’t want people to turn off their cable TV.”
Source – Google