A One-Sided Net Neutrality Debate - Page 2

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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.