By: Spacelab Research Staff
The Federal
Communications Comission held a hearing at Stanford University last
week to talk about Net Neutrality, this time in regards to network
management. It sounds geeky and boring, but it actually has a huge
impact on how we get to view and download content from the Internet.
The
hearing went down at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet
& Society, so that Silicon Valley players and minds could attend
the hearing. If you've got some time, you can watch the whole hearing
online at the VonTv web site.
Comcast,
Pando Networks, AT&T, TimeWarner, and CableLabs were all invited to
participate in the hearing. They all declined to attend, meaning that
they all declined to go on the public record in accounting for their
practices. Even Comcast and Pando Networks were reinvited to describe
their customer bill of rights which was launched last week (perhaps in response to the hearing?), but declined again.
At
the heart of the issue is the decision by ISP's like Comcast to monitor
traffic on their networks, and whether that serves the public interest.
Supporters of Net Neutrality often say that the business owners are
conflicted in their interest to monitor their own networks, often
throttling or stopping traffic that includes P2P services and torrents.
These methods of downloading can carry copyrighted content and can
contain high amounts of traffic dedicated to unauthorized sharing of
that copyrighted content.
Comcast announced in April that it would work with BitTorrent to find a solution.
There's
legitmate uses for P2P and torrents too, so shutting down the network's
capacity to carry their traffic punishes legitmate use also. Given the
history of Comcast and how they've presented their side of the case,
sometimes being caught telling lies,
it's hard to see how they will be straight-forward in talking about it
in the future, let alone run their network in a way that benefits
paying customers as much as it benefits Comcast.
Plus,
Comcast can run their network however they want, because it's their
network. That brings about a real challenge, because if Comcast is the
only broadband service provider in your area, how can you make a choice
to go with someone else?
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