Remember that two of the five commissioners have taken fairly strong stances against the NN provisions in the AT&T;/BellSouth merger, suggesting they would be hostile to NN. (pdf) Two others seem to favor some form of NN. The fifth abstained from voting on the AT&T; deal, so I’m not sure where he stands. So while some on the libertarian side may be suspicious of an FCC power grab, here, some NN proponents are probably just as suspicious that this is a procedural maneuver to bury the debate. (The FCC doesn’t have to act on a notice of inquiry. They can gather all the comments and then say “based on these comments, we don’t think regulation is necessary right now.”) A third possibility is that it’s a power struggle in which the FCC’s trying to head off congressional legislation. Or, maybe they’re just trying to hash it out once and for all so they don’t have to revisit it every time they need to vote on a new telecom or cable merger.

The questions about prioritizing packets come up for a number of reasons. IP version 4 allows something called “type of service” or “quality of service,” but anecdotally very few networks seem to support it. It’s possible some of them are prioritizing based on other traits of the packets, like port number. It may also be possible that they have plans to prioritize but haven’t started doing it yet. Some forms of NN disagree with prioritization, others disagree with it only when a network changes the priority level depending on the content’s source (as opposed to the type of content), so for example they might object if AT&T, which co-brands its DSL service with Yahoo, were to prioritize Yahoo searches over Google searches for all AT&T customers.

Remember that two of the five commissioners have taken fairly strong stances against the NN provisions in the AT&T/BellSouth merger, suggesting they would be hostile to NN. (pdf) Two others seem to favor some form of NN. The fifth abstained from voting on the AT&T deal, so I’m not sure where he stands. So while some on the libertarian side may be suspicious of an FCC power grab, here, some NN proponents are probably just as suspicious that this is a procedural maneuver to bury the debate. (The FCC doesn’t have to act on a notice of inquiry. They can gather all the comments and then say “based on these comments, we don’t think regulation is necessary right now.”) A third possibility is that it’s a power struggle in which the FCC’s trying to head off congressional legislation. Or, maybe they’re just trying to hash it out once and for all so they don’t have to revisit it every time they need to vote on a new telecom or cable merger.