By Sam Gustin, Portfolio.com

Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, violated federal guidelines when it blocked and degraded Web traffic, the head of the Federal Communications Commission will announce Friday.

The sanctions would be the first time the commission has come down on an internet provider for denying consumers the right to open, unfettered internet access. It may set a precedent on how the federal government oversees management of internet traffic flows in the future.

Last fall, Comcast reluctantly acknowledged that it had temporarily blocked certain peer-to-peer traffic (file sharing). The cable giant called its actions "reasonable network management."

But consumer rights groups and internet experts accused the company of violating the F.C.C.'s 2005 "Internet Policy Statement," which established four principles intended to guarantee consumers unfettered access to all legal Web content, applications, and services.

The chairman of the F.C.C., Kevin Martin, now agrees.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers' access to the internet," he told the Associated Press on Thursday night. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

The consumer advocacy group Free Press trumpeted Martin's decision as a victory for consumers.

"This is going to be a bellwether," said Ben Scott, federal policy chief for Free Press.

The decision, contained in an order to be circulated by Martin, brings the agency's nine-month investigation of Comcast close to completion. Martin, a Republican, is expected to gain support from the two Democratic F.C.C. commissioners for his position, which would ensure the order's passage when the commission meets on August 1.

Comcast has long maintained that the government's standard gives it the right to manage its digital traffic "reasonably" for the sake of "network management."

For almost a year, consumer rights groups have battled Comcast, after an Associated Press investigation discovered that Comcast was blocking legal peer-to-peer traffic.

Comcast faced further public outrage after it admitted to paying people off the street to sit at a public hearing at Harvard, while members of the public were prevented from attending. At the time, Comcast claimed it merely paid people to save spots at the hearing for Comcast employees, but the event's organizer disputed that claim.

Burn comcast burn. Wanna show your support? join a torrent of a nice large linux iso, and get your friends to do the same. Legal, excessive usage of network.

and run Second Life (tm) at the same time!

oh and make sure your streaming from here and there with 5 win amps too! and a few vids as well...

the reason I never went "cable" I'll take my 6-9K DSL over throttled and "shared" hi speed any day!

According to the CircleID post by Richard Bennett, he 'will not seek a fine against Comcast.

Rather, he will simply impose some reporting requirements on them and order them to do what they've already started to do, phase out the current traffic management system in favor of an application-agnostic one.

Damnit... Still, I say, charter users, fire up your webcams, fire up your abc.com streaming radio (you can mute it, don't worry), host a gaming server, invite all your friends to come play. Spider the web, randomly imaging entire sites, go for really big ones. even better, one that tricks you and sends endless junk data as fast as you can get it.

Show comcast that you care.

I meant comcast in my post above.. sorry.

AFAIK, charter isn't doing anything to disable my torrenting that I can see. they start out very slow, but thats par for the course.