FCC adopts new Regulations to protect Web traffic

Federal regulators adopted new rules today to keep the companies that control the Internet’s pipelines from blocking competing services, including online calling applications and Web video and restricting what their customers do online. The vote by the Federal Communications Commission was 3-2 and quickly came under fire by the commission’s two Republicans, who said the rules would discourage investments in broad band. Prominent Republicans in Congress vowed to work to overturn them. Meanwhile critics at the other end of the political spectrum were disappointed that the new rules do not do enough to safeguard the fastest growing way that people access the Internet today, through wireless devices like tablets and smart phones.

The new regulations 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 guarantee that broad band providers can not use their control of the Internet’s on ramps to dictate where their subscribers can go. They will prohibit cable and phone companies from discriminating against or favoring services and Internet content that travel over their networks, including Internet video services such as Netflix ,online calling services such as Skype and other applications that compete with their core businesses.

The prohibitions, known as  net neutrality, have been at the center of a Washington policy dispute for at least five years. The issue hit home with many Internet users in 2007, when slowed traffic from an Internet file sharing service called Bit Torrent. The cable giant argued that the service, which was used to trade big files over the Internet and movies was slowing  its network.

The new FCC regulations are intended to keep that type of behavior from happening. They require broadband providers  to let subscribers access all legal online content, application and services over their wired networks. They do give providers flexibility to manage data on their systems to deal with network congestion and unwanted spam and traffic as long as they disclose how they manage the network. “Today, for the first time we are adopting rules to preserve basic Internet values,” Genachowski said. “For the first time, we’ll have enforceable rules of the road to preserve Internet freedom and openness.”he also acknowledged that a key goal of the new rules is to preserve the open Internet as it exists today.