During the course of its arguments with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Comcast on Friday, the judges of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit suggested the likelihood of rejecting the FCC's authority in censuring Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer applications.

The court decision comes in response to the FCC's 2008 decision against the Philadelphia-based Comcast, whereby it ordered the cable firm to stop impeding the peer-to-peer service BitTorrent as a traffic-management practice. The FCC order came in the wake of complaints that Comcast was sending bogus signals to users of BitTorrent, which is a bandwidth-heavy protocol used generally for pirating copyright content.

As per a story published by The Wall Street Journal, (WSJ) the federal judges apparently rebuffed the FCC's justification of the Comcast censure for decelerating file-sharing traffic on its Internet connections.

Though the three-judge panel has not specified when it would give its ruling in the case, it has reportedly told the FCC lawyer that the agency has yet to identify a "specific statute;" with Chief Judge David Sentelle saying: "You can't get an unbridled, roving commission to go about doing good."

Acknowledging the fact that a loss in this case would adversely affect the FCC's endeavors to establish official Net neutrality rules, the agency's Chairman Julius Genachowski said: "This case underscores the importance of the FCC's ongoing rule making to preserve the free and open Internet."