Pandora's Death Knell Could Boost Sirius XM
U.S. Courts: The Death Knell Of Pandora: A Win for Sirius XM
By Brandon Matthews
If you blinked, you missed it. I’m talking about possibly the biggest news to
hit Satellite Radio news wires in more than a year. In a surprise move, the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled unanimously
against the FCC's net neutrality rules.
The three judge panel determined that the FCC did not have the authority to
mandate that Internet Service Providers give equal treatment to all Internet
traffic flowing over their networks.
Hidden below the usual fluff that is commonplace with anything in
Washington, is that these rules began due to one specific issue in which
Comcast interfered with a data hogging service called BitTorrent. The
service caused severe strains on Comcast’s network.
The FCC then banned Comcast from blocking the video file sharing service,
and maintained that all ISP’s must provide whatever content people may
want, no matter what the cost to the ISP. This was great news for all data
hogs– including Pandora.
The move by the federal court paves the way for ISP’s to now more
effectively manage their bandwidth, up to and including putting limitations
on data gorging services such as Pandora. In fact, service providers are
now free to halt or suspend high data usage applications as necessary, to
protect the quality of service they provide.
Although this is unlikely, it is probable that wireless carriers will soon require
fees for specific applications such as Pandora from consumers, as their
infrastructure needs increase over time.
It will now take years of legal wranglings for this issue to resolve itself.
Unfortunately for Pandora, time is running out and it just may be too late to
change their business model. The idea of unlimited free Internet Radio is
now dead. “Pandora…there WAS an app for that.”
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