The FCC is finally doing something I agree with:

The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation’s largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of “file sharing” software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

Martin said Comcast has “arbitrarily” blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so.

The traffic that Comcast was blocking was BitTorrent traffic. Sure there is a lot of pirating going on with BitTorrent, but there is also a lot of legitimate transfers, such as downloading different Linux builds. Also Comcast does not have the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in deciding what is legal and not.

This can be viewed as a small victory for net neutrality, but that fight is far from over. In the end we need to see the internet regulated more like a public utility, than a private sector service. The internet has become a too important factor in day to day operations around the world to not be benefited the same protections.