A federal appeals court gave notice Friday it likely would reject the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to sanction Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer applications.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit suggested as much during oral arguments from the FCC and Comcast. The Philadelphia-based cable concern is appealing the agency’s 2008 decision ordering it to stop hampering the peer-to-peer service BitTorrent as a traffic-management practice.

The move was in response to complaints Comcast was sending fake signals to users of BitTorrent, a bandwidth-heavy protocol often used to pirate copyright content.