newly-appointed
In an interview with The Hill, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the agency wants to maintain openness for any consumer accessing the internet.
“One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles,” he said.
Genachowski's comments come amid a legal battle with Comcast. The MSO is appealing a previous FCC action barring it from rate limiting Internet user's bandwidth consumption on its network.
Genachowski, who took the FCC chairman post in July, said the agency's general counsel is developing a legal strategy to uphold its stance on “net neutrality.”
In a bipartisan move, Genachowski's predecessor Kevin Martin, a Republican, sided with the agency's Democrats to penalize Comcast for dialing down customer access to file-sharing program BitTorrent in 2008.
Separately, many of the largest US service providers, including Comcast, AT&T, Qwest and Verizon, said the net neutrality tenet in the new broadband stimulus package was one of many reasons they decided not to apply for the first round of financial grants from the National Telecommunications Industry Association (NTIA).
The Hill
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