On March 16, the Federal Communications Commission issued its National Broadband Plan, a compendium of lofty goals for extending broadband penetration throughout the United States and targeting specific industries and sectors, such as health care and education. See www.broadband.gov. As part of the plan, the FCC explicitly supported the principle of “net neutrality,” that of ensuring that Internet backbone providers may not impose premium pricing or discriminatory access upon content and applications providers that use their networks, no matter how heavy their use of the available bandwidth.

Three weeks later, the plan’s future was thrown into doubt by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Comcast Corp. v. FCC, No. 08-1291 (D.C. Cir. April 6, 2010). The court ruled, in a major victory for Internet backbone providers such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and the leading cable operators — and a setback for net-neutrality proponents, including major content and application providers such as Google Inc./YouTube Inc., Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc. and Facebook Inc. and the FCC itself — that the FCC exceeded its “ancillary authority” under the Communications Act of 1934 in attempting to restrict Comcast’s network management practices. The case arose when Comcast subscribers discovered that the cable operator was blocking their use of certain peer-to-peer networking applications, which allow sharing of files without passing through a central server.

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