The FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wanted to set a precedent by making the commission vote that Comcast engaged in unreasonable traffic management practices, and eventually succeeded in doing so. The Federal Communication Commission voted 3-2 that Comcast should change its 'discriminatory network practices' within a month, but failed again at saying which practices can be considered discriminatory and under which circumstances.

To remind you what happened, the FCC received a series of complaints against Comcast, according to which the Internet provider was blocking or slowing down the connections of several peer to peer programs to the net. More precisely, BitTorent users sometimes found it difficult to upload files using the program. While Comcast said at that time that it is blocking these programs only during network congestion hours, studies have shown that this wasn't true, and that the Internet provider was slowing down these connections in an apparently arbitrary manner.

The fact that the FCC decided to stop companies from doing such things is a good idea, but the commission seems to have stumbled just when it was needed more. While it said that it considers that Internet providers should at times prioritize some programs over others in order to avoid traffic problems, and that they should make public which programs they have slowed down in order to do this and why, the commission failed to give precise figures on the matter.

This will probably leave operators wondering what the commission wants from them, and what they should and should not do in order to keep out of trouble.