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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has scheduled a meeting for Friday during which one of the hottest issues right now will be finally dealt with. FCC officials will determine whether or not Comcast should be sanctioned for slowing down and, at times, blocking P2P traffic.
Right now, things don’t seem to be looking too good for Comcast, as three of the five FCC commissioners who are in charge with taking the vote, have already expressed their intention to rule against the company. However, all five must unanimously reach the resolution to support net neutrality. If this should happen, Comcast would be forced to stop tampering with the P2P file-sharing traffic over its network.
At the end of March, after being accused of having interfered with Internet traffic, Comcast announced the restructuring of its Internet traffic management, thus enforcing a plan to handle all data equally and objectively. At the time, FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin seemed to be rather skeptical with regard to the company’s ability to change its practices.
In November, the FCC received a a complaint against Comcast from a coalition of public interest groups, in which the company was accused of violating FCC policy by blocking peer-to-peer Internet traffic. Although at first Comcast declared that it was not breaking any of the principles of "net neutrality", it was eventually forced to admit that it did significantly slow down certain peer-to-peer transfers. Such actions were considered to be necessary for preventing the entire network from slowing down because of certain customers that were uploading large amounts of data.
Things will once and for all be made clear on Friday.
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