This is the Catered Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 8, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

The FCC does not have the authority to tell internet service providers how they must treat different kinds of traffic.

That from a federal appeals court this week, but Congress has yet to weigh in.

Jim Harper, director of the Cato Institute's information policy studies, says competition is what should govern how we move our data.

In the fall of 2007, Comcast was discovered interfering with some users access to the internet using a was users of Comcast's services to get their internet access.

What they did to resolve this wasn't very well handled.

It was controversial to many technologists.

And by the spring of 2008, Comcast had reversed its policy and began

to work with the makers of this protocol called BitTorrent. They basically resolved the problem.

But four or five months later, the FCC stepped in having been invited by various consumer groups and scolded in

in a formal order Comcast for having done this and required Comcast not to do it again to be more transparent about its behavior.

Though the problem was fixed many months before, this has since then boiled around in the courts and the DC

Circuit has ruled that the FCC overstepped its authority. It had not been

granted authority by Congress to regulate internet access services and it couldn't use what is called ancillary jurisdiction.

That's authority that's close enough to the authority it's been given.

And so the ruling has found that to

regulate internet access the way the FCC wants to, it has to get authority from

Congress and if it doesn't get that authority it can't.

Well what are the horror stories on both sides in terms of what the future holds with or without

this type of control by the FCC? The context of all this is what's called net

neutrality regulation. The idea being that internet service providers should

provide wide open end-to-end internet service not interfering with any

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