A One-Sided Net Neutrality Debate

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.

Page 2 of 2

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.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to our newsletter.

Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis

News Around the Web