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This week’s a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Comcast against the Federal Communications Commission. The decision, which says in part that the FCC has no authority to impose restrictions on Comcast and their ability to control their network, delivered a huge blow to proponents of Net Neutrality.

For a little background, the Net Neutrality principles put in place by the FCC are as follows:

1. People are entitled to access the legal Internet content of their choice.
2. They are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the requirements of the law.
3. People are entitled to connect legal devices of their choice that do not harm the network.
4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.
5. Prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management.
6. Ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.

The FCC and Comcast butted heads over Comcast’s decision to slow or block access to the BitTorrent file sharing system. Comcast’s decision was made in the name of speeding up content delivery across the network. BitTorrent is well known for being used to transfer very large multimedia files, including full length movies. While some can argue that this particular decision was made in the interest of end users, the concern is that allowing providers to restrict or block access to public sites would open the door to allowing them to discriminate against web sites and content that does not benefit them financially.

I don’t think that the court’s decision was necessarily bad for the FCC. The court had to address the fact that the FCC currently doesn’t have federal authority to regulate Internet services, and therefore could not impose restrictions on Comcast for violating their principles. But in my opinion, that was needed to prompt Congress to pass legislation to give the FCC explicit authority. I believe that we will see such legislation within the next couple of years.