Comcast not fined, but must stop blocking P2P traffic

Here’s an update to the story about the FCC versus Comcast that we posted on Wednesday. The FCC has officially ruled today and it turns out that Comcast will not be fined for throttling peer-to-peer network traffic, but it will have to stop discriminating against certain internet traffic until the company comes up with a compliance plan “to fully disclose its practices” to customers.

Bloomberg reports that the five-member FCC panel voted 3-2 against Comcast. Critics of Comcast’s traffic-regulating activities are calling the ruling a “bellwether case”. It’s important to note that although Comcast has been ordered to stop throttling traffic, it appears that the reasoning behind the ruling has more to do with the fact that the throttling wasn’t being disclosed to customers, not that the throttling was actually taken place. So it appears that bandwidth management can and will continue, it’ll just have to be more transparent.