FCC vote today expected to pass partial net neutrality protections

Internet service providers (ISPs) have argued that they should be able to prioritise the delivery to subscribers of traffic from companies that pay them because they believe publishers should contribute to the costs of delivering their material.

The idea is opposed by critics who say that it would mean that ISP customers should be given access to all the internet's information on equal footing, unaffected by which publishers pay their ISP. They believe that the network should not decide what content is viewable, and support net neutrality.

The FCC will today vote on proposals that aim to find middle ground between campaigners who want ISPs to be forced to behave in a completely neutral way and telecoms companies who resist regulation of the way they conduct their businesses.

The FCC's plan would force ISPs to be open about the traffic restrictions they have in place and would forbid them from blocking any lawful internet traffic.

The FCC will today vote on "an Order adopting basic rules of the road to preserve the open Internet as a platform for innovation, investment, competition, and free expression," said an FCC statement. "These rules would protect consumers’ and innovators’ right to know basic information about broadband service, right to send and receive lawful Internet traffic, and right to a level playing field, while providing broadband Internet access providers with the flexibility to reasonably manage their networks."

The FCC is a five-person body made up of three Democrat and two Republican party commissioners. Chairman Julius Genachowski and one other commissioner have said that they will support the order, while a third said that while he has reservations about it he will not vote against it.

"While I cannot vote wholeheartedly to approve the item, I will not block it by voting against it,” said Michael Copps, according to the Bloomberg news agency. Copps is the FCC's strongest defender of net neutrality. He said he would "concur" with the proposal, but that he had hoped that it would go further in protecting net neutrality principles.

ISPs generally do manage their traffic to ensure that heavy users do not use so much of their bandwidth that other users cannot get online, and to prioritise some kinds of traffic over others. Some, for example, ensure that bandwidth-light email traffic gets through ahead of more resource-intensive peer to peer file sharing traffic.

The FCC proposal allows ISPs to engage in reasonable network management.

The FCC plan follows a court ruling earlier this year which rebuked it for ordering Comcast not to distinguish between kinds of traffic. It had told Comcast not to slow down peer to peer traffic but a federal court said that the FCC had acted beyond its powers.

The current FCC plan is designed to have a similar effect without exceeding the regulator's powers.

It is fiercely opposed by telecoms companies, though, and by at least one of the FCC commissioners.

"I strongly oppose this ill-advised maneuver," said commissioner Robert M McDowell. "[These] rules would upend three decades of bipartisan and international consensus that the Internet is best able to thrive in the absence of regulation."

"This 'agreement' has been extracted in defiance of not only the courts, but a large, bipartisan majority of Congress as well," he said. "Both have admonished the FCC not to reach beyond its statutory powers to regulate Internet access. By choosing this highly interventionist course, the Commission is ignoring the will of the elected representatives of the American people."