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by Wendy Davis,

The Federal Communications Commission, Internet service providers and Web companies “made new progress” on Saturday toward striking a deal about net neutrality, according to a report by industry analysts Stifel Nicolaus.

The report says that the players have reached a “general agreement on some principles,” but no consensus on a few critical issues, including whether wireless service would also be subject to neutrality principles.

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Almost a year ago, Comcast pledged that it would sue the Federal Communications Commission over its Order sanctioning the cable ISP for peer-to-peer throttling. Now, the company has filed its case with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Although Comcast’s legal arguments are complex, the crux is simple: there were and still are no statutes or credible regulations that support the Commission’s authority to act on this matter, the company says.

“For the FCC to conclude that an entity has acted in violation of federal law and to take enforcement action for such a violation, there must have been ‘law’ to violate,” Comcast’s Opening Brief to the court contends. “Here, no such law existed.”

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Viviane Reding, the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, says that an open Internet is “crucial” to Europe. But that doesn’t mean a little traffic shaping, service prioritization, and discrimination won’t be allowed.

In a September 2008 speech in Copenhagen, Reding told a network neutrality conference that “a cynical observer may note that in the end this whole Net Neutrality debate is about hard cash. Dollars and euros… This is just arm wrestling between big network providers and successful providers of Internet services.”

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Under government pressure, copyright holders and ISPs in New Zealand have been meeting for months to hash out a Code of Conduct for disconnecting repeat Internet “pirates.” It’s a process that requires the unanimous agreement of all parties, but ISP TelstraClear has now publicly refused to back the process, saying that disconnecting users based on content owner complaints was simply unfair.

The New Zealand government decided last year that this sort of “graduated response” mechanism sounded like a hunky-dory way to curtail the rampant trading of copyrighted works online. The result was a new section of copyright law, section 92a, which said that “an Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.”

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The French attempt to pass the world’s toughest “graduated response” law against P2P file-sharers has been en retard for months. But the negotiations are finally over, the “Création et Internet” bill has been drafted, and today it finally came up before the National Assembly for debate. Despite furious opposition, the bill could well pass soon, laying down severe penalties for “not securing one’s Internet connection” and forcing public WiFi operators to allow access only to a “white list” of acceptable sites. And all this for one industry.

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