Federal regulators in the US have adopted new rules to keep internet suppliers from restricting what their customers do online or from blocking competing services, including online calling applications and web video.
The vote by the Federal Communications Commission was 3-2 and quickly came under attack from the commission’s two Republicans, who said the rules would discourage investments in broadband.
Meanwhile, critics at the other end of the political spectrum were disappointed that the new regulations don’t do enough to safeguard the fastest-growing way that people access the internet today – through wireless devices like smart phones and tablets.
The new rules have the backing of the White House and capped a year of efforts by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski to find a compromise. They are intended to ensure that broadband providers cannot use their control of access to the internet to dictate where their subscribers can go.
They will prohibit phone and cable companies from favouring or discriminating against internet content and services that travel over their networks – including online calling services such as Skype, internet video services such as Netflix and other applications that compete with their core businesses.
The prohibitions, known as “net neutrality,” have been at the centre of a Washington policy dispute for at least five years. The issue hit home with many internet users in 2007, when Comcast slowed traffic from internet file-sharing service called BitTorrent. The cable giant argued that the service, which was used to trade movies and other big files over the internet, was clogging its network.
The new FCC rules are intended to prevent that type of behaviour.
They require broadband providers to let subscribers access all legal online content, applications and services over their wired networks. They do give providers flexibility to manage data on their systems to deal with network congestion and unwanted traffic, including spam, as long as they publicly disclose how they manage the network.