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Not Many Fireworks in Latest Net Neutrality Debate
(www.internetnews.com Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) PALO ALTO, CALIF. - What if someone held a debate and only one side showed up? The likely result is what happened here Thursday on the campus of Stanford University, where a bunch of people sat around mostly agreeing with each other.
To be sure, there were some differences of opinion in this debate on Net neutrality, sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission. But they were minor compared to the fireworks that would have ensued had the Internet Service Providers showed up.
Of course, that's probably why they stayed away.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioner Robert McDowell expressed disappointment that Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and CableLabs declined repeated invitations to show at the event. Comcast did participate at a similar public hearing at Harvard Law School earlier this year. Martin also spoke on the issue of network neutrality at an event at Stanford Law School just last month.
"I do wish there were some network operators here to answer questions," he said. "I am very disappointed that they aren't here."
The ISPs, and Comcast in particular, are under fire for slowing or throttling traffic on their networks, in particular peer-to-peer traffic like BiTTorrent, which is used to exchange large amounts of data. Among the guest speakers was Robb Topolski, a network engineer who first uncovered that Comcast was throttling network traffic.
Comcast has since made its traffic shaping policy public and made peace with BitTorrent, although Topolski complained that the throttling is "still going on today."
The event opened with statements from the entire FCC panel. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps won over the audience the best with his speech. "It is important to the economy and our position in the world that the open Internet, perhaps the most wonderful innovation since the printing press, be kept open," he said. "There are powerful interests in the land who would bring it under control for their purposes which may not be your purposes."
Don't tread on me
Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein was also pretty vocal in calling for power to deal with companies like Comcast, lest they interfere with the Internet again. " Consumers are saying 'don't tread on me' and people who look the other way do so at their own peril, and the government that does so does it at its own peril," he said.
However, Martin was a little more restrained, arguing that the FCC's current Internet policy is sufficient and only needs to be enforced to guarantee that whatever actions Internet service providers are taking is tailored to "a legitimate purpose." He also sided with Comcast, saying it should be permitted to manage its network to insure that traffic flows smoothly.
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig gave the FCC an earful in his usual genteel manner. "We are facing these problems because of a failure of FCC policy," he said, with the full FCC sitting a few feet behind him. "The burden should be on those who would change its architecture," Lessig continued.
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Later, Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America, brought up the issue eating at the music industry, piracy.
"In the last ten years, I've watched illegal file sharing destroy the lives of friends by depriving them of their livelihood, their income, and an opportunity to do what they love. Half of songwriting jobs in America have been lost to piracy," he told the audience, which had gotten rather quiet at that point.
"For ten years, piracy has destroyed the profession of songwriting while no one regulated it. Now there is hope that the same unregulated marketplace will manage that," he concluded.
He was followed by Michele Combs, vice president with the Christian Coalition, who was as adamant for Net Neutrality as Lessig. "The Internet provides a voice for even the most modest in our society to distribute information on a scale previously only reserved to the elite," she said.
Combs argued that that the Christian Coalition didn't want anyone "snooping into our content" and blocking or slowing them down because of it.
Network management to the rescue?
But while there no ISPs, one contrarian voice was heard on the panel. Network engineer and former ZDNet blogger George Ou argued that network management "has and always will be an essential part of the Internet." He said throwing bandwidth at the problem doesn't fix it because there are a few hogs that will consume all you give them.
In Japan, where they have 100 megabit broadband to the home, they found that just one percent of users accounted for 47 percent of capacity and 10 percent used 75 percent capacity. "The other ninety percent of the population gets stuck with twenty five percent of the resources," he said.
His point was that it was not fair for a few to consume so much bandwidth at the expense of others. The place was rather quiet.
An opposing view to Ou came from an unlikely source, Jean Prewitt, president of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, who said that after ten years of vertical integration and consolidation, "diversity programming no longer appears on TV networks. We want to make sure the Internet itself doesn't become the type of closed bastion that TV has become," Prewitt said to rousing applause.
Carnes spoke up only once after his prepared statement to ask what Topolski was uploading when he first discovered Comcast's chicanery. He replied it was barbershop quartet music he's gotten off of old wax cylinders that was long out of copyright protection.
In the end, nothing was settled. With no ISPs on hand to defend or explain their policies, there was little in the way of fireworks except from Ou, who repeatedly insisted that Lessig and Free Press, an organization Lessig belongs to that has been hounding Comcast about its BitTorrent throttling, wanted a metered Internet. Lessig denied this.
Copyright ? 2008 Jupitermedia Corp.
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