FCC Orders Comcast to Stop Throttling BitTorrent Traffic in Historic 3-2 Vote on Net Neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission votes 3-2 to punish Comcast for its “surreptitious interference” with BitTorrent uploads, marking the first time any U.S. broadband provider has been found to violate net neutrality principles. The Commission formally adopted an order finding that Comcast violated the neutrality principles established in the FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement by secretly throttling peer-to-peer traffic without disclosure to customers.

The FCC order specifically rejected Comcast’s claim that it was merely “delaying” BitTorrent traffic as “verbal gymnastics,” explicitly finding that “the company has engaged in blocking.” The Commission ordered Comcast to completely disclose its discriminatory network management practices to customers and cease these practices by year’s end. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin credited the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s technical investigation, which had independently verified the Associated Press’s findings that Comcast was forging TCP reset packets to interfere with peer-to-peer applications.

This landmark enforcement action represented a crucial precedent for net neutrality regulation and demonstrated that the FCC would act to prevent ISPs from secretly discriminating against lawful internet traffic. However, the decision’s foundation proved legally fragile—in 2010, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals would overturn this order in Comcast Corp. v. FCC, ruling that the FCC lacked statutory authority to enforce net neutrality without first reclassifying broadband providers as common carriers under Title II. This judicial defeat would force net neutrality advocates to pursue Title II reclassification as the only legally durable path to protecting open internet principles.