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Late last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC (News - Alert)) finally passed a ‘net neutrality’ rule that guarantees unrestricted access to legal (as opposed to illegal) Web content for home Internet users.

The ruling, passed by a 3-2 vote, prevents Internet services providers like Verizon or AT&T (News - Alert) from blocking access to lawful Web content and sites. It also affects providers of wired broadband services.

Naturally, this has resulted in a lot of talk on both sides of the issue. This very dialog is likely to stymie the rule actually having much an impact for quite some time. That’s the viewpoint of Ronald Del Sesto, Jr., partner at Bingham McCutchen, a law firm and legal consulting company with a wide range of practices including telecommunications.

At ITEXPO (News - Alert) East 2011 in Miami earlier this year, TMCnet Web Editor Juliana Kenny spoke with Del Sesto to get his take on net neutrality.

Del Sesto started by saying that, as a lawyer, the policy questions surrounding net neutrality are of most interest to him. He observed a positive trend at the event in that most people in the telecom and technology industry are very well versed in policy, and this definitely helps deepen the conversation.

The response from engineers, he said, seems to be that the FCC got net neutrality wrong, and that it will require rescinding the rule or revising it significantly before the industry accepts it.

“With net neutrality, the FCC may have been too results-oriented,” Del Sesto told Kenny. “There’s a lot of concern about the rules. If you’re in the technology industry, policy matters.”

Since policy has real-world results, if the FCC indeed missed the mark on this one, alignment of intent and impact must occur—and that will take time.

“Net neutrality (News - Alert) has a long way to go,” Del Sesto said. “I’m not sure these rules will ever become effective. There will be litigation surrounding them. Congress has talked about appealing them. They’ve certainly started a discussion, but in terms of the rules being enforceable, I’m not sure we’ll see that in 2011 or ever.”

Watch the full video interview below.