New House bill treats network freedom as anti-trust issue

There’s another net neutrality bill on the floor of the US House. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) proposed the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act (H.R. 5994) this week, a bill that would make net neutrality “an antitrust matter.”

The problem with the bill is that it doesn’t outright ban discrimination against certain types of data. In fact, it would allow an ISP to restrict, say, BitTorrent traffic. However, under the proposed law, if an ISP decides to restrict BitTorrent it has to restrict all torrent traffic equally. This is hardly a step in the right direction since it gives legal protection to ISPs to tell people how they can and cannot access data.

TagsHR 5994, John Conyers