Court Deals Terrible Blow to Net Neutrality

This ruling doesn't bode well for gamers or people that download large files off of the Internet.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC's authority to impose such "network neutrality" obligations on broadband providers.

That means that Comcast or Time Warner can now put out more tiered plans or simply block certain packets traveling along their networks. Or if you are sending too many gaming packets they can throttle you and lag-out your connection unless you pay for a "gamers plan" or something similar.

All I can say is that the next stop needs to be the Supreme Court. There needs to be some sort of curb on the power these companies will soon have over information moving along the Internet. This is especially important now that cloud computing is starting to take off.