Using words like "misdirection," "obfuscation," "absurd" and "verbal gymnastics," the Federal Communications Commission released its formal decision Wednesday ordering Comcast to stop throttling BitTorrrent traffic, a practice the carrier has repeatedly denied performing.

Buried in the commission's vitriolic-filled 67-page decision – which was announced three weeks ago and formalized in written form on Wednesday – lurks an open invitation to internet service providers to filter content. In essence, the commission said carriers cannot discriminate against file sharing protocols, but they may act as a traffic cops and block illegal material and "transmissions that violate copyright law."

The commission on Wednesday reiterated that Comcast violated net neutrality rules when it blocked BitTorrent file transfers. In no uncertain terms, however, the commission endorsed throttling internet traffic.

Consider an excerpt of page 31 of the order (.pdf):

"We also note that because consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice, providers, consistent with federal policy, may block transmissions of illegal content (e.g., child pornography) or transmissions that violate copyright law. To the extent, however, that providers choose to utilize practices that are not application or content neutral, the risk to the open nature of the internet is particularly acute and the danger of network management practices being used to further anticompetitive ends is strong."

And if those words were not enough evidence of the FCC's endorsement of internet throttling, blocking, filtering – call it what you will, the written comments Wednesday from commission Chairman Kevin Martin drive home the point.

Martin said when the commission decides whether an internet carrier violated net neutrality rules, it "considers whether the network management practice is intended to distinguish between legal and illegal activity. The Commission’s network principles only recognize and protect user’s access to legal content. The sharing of illegal content, such as child pornography or content that does not have the appropriate copyright, is not protected by our principles. Similarly, applications that are intended to harm the network are not protected."

Still, network-level filtering technology isn't ready for prime time. It's emerging and being endorsed by Hollywood and internet carriers whose willingness to block content is already known.

Most of the nation's largest internet carriers, in a recent deal with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, have already removed from their servers web sites hosting child pornography and have begun filtering smut from Usenet news groups via hash-marking technology or shuttering the groups altogether.

What's more, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, digital filtering companies and AT&T said the climate was ripe "to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level."

Internet service provider AT&T has been discussing with technology companies, members of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America about "implementing digital fingerprinting techniques."

And in October, Google adopted a copyright filtering system for its popular YouTube video sharing site.

Sony and Universal have begun embedding their music downloads with watermarks that can easily be traced via peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Microsoft is betting on watermarking's future – last year winning a patent for a "stealthy audio watermarking" scheme called El Dorado.

The FCC's vision of net neutrality: throttling, blocking, filtering – call it what you will.

Illustration surfstyle

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