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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) met this week at Stanford University to talk about network management or net neutrality. The specific issue was Comcast's well publicized habit of deciding what information makes it through their broadband pipes and what does not.
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig was one of the people scheduled to speak at the hearings. Before the hearings began, he was interviewed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. Lessig is the founder and co-director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society and chair of the Creative Commons project. Goodman asked him to define Net Neutrality.
AMY GOODMAN: What exactly does “net neutrality” mean?
LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah. It means—it’s something that should be very familiar. Think about the electricity grid. All right, when you plug a television into the electricity grid, it doesn’t ask, “Is it a Sony television or a Panasonic television?” It doesn’t ask, “Is it a toaster made in America or a toaster made in Japan?” It just runs. It just works. And that’s because the electricity grid is a neutral network in this sense. You comply with the protocols—what the plug’s got to look like and how much power you’re taking—and it runs. That’s the way the internet was. It used to be it didn’t matter whether it was a browser made by Microsoft or a browser made by Netscape or a browser made by Mozilla. It just ran because the protocols said if you follow the rules, the system will run.
What’s happening now is it’s as if the electricity company was beginning to control what you could plug into the electricity grid, deciding which televisions it would allow and basically selling the right to be a television on the electricity grid. So they say, for example, if you want to have internet content on our platform, you’re going to have to pay us to have internet content on your platform. So it’s not about the consumer having the power to choose whatever the consumer wants to watch. It’s about whether the network owner also wants to make this available to the consumer. So it radically changes what the internet is and makes it something much less vibrant and potential for democracy and free speech.
You can hear or watch the complete Amy Goodman interview with Lawrence Lessing at the democrarynow.org site.
Chloe Albanesius at GearLog heard the hearings. She wrote FCC Grill Tech Experts on Comcast Network Policies. Her introduction:
I jumped back on the webcast to catch the tail end of the first panel on network management and consumer expectations, where the commissioners grilled more than a half dozen experts.
Below are some highlights from the rather spirited debate.
Chloe didn't cover the whole hearing, but you do get a quick look at some of the conversation at her site.
You can find more coverage at the FCC site's page on audio/video events, which promises a complete audio recording of the hearings will be posted soon.
SavetheInternet.com has all sorts of background information and transcripts of the statements of various experts at the FCC Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet.
As SavetheInternet.com points out,
Not one person on the expert panels, made up of scholars, network engineers, lawyers, and consumer advocates defended Comcast's practices of blocking and discriminating online.
Further background is available from The Writing Corner: Beth Wellington on politics and culture in the article Comcast and AT&T et. al. snub FCC broadband hearing. Beth talks about the previous hearing, held in February at Harvard, and points out that Comcast and others declined to attend this week's hearing.
Michele Masterson at Channel Web reports that Comcast Passes On FCC Net Neutrality Hearing.
Comcast's non-attendance comes just days after it said it was launching a "best practices" industry initiative about how to manage peer-to-peer filing sharing and that it will work with Pando Networks, a provider of managed P2P content delivery services.
Now isn't that an interesting development? Especially since Comcast did attend the first hearing on this topic, but stuffed the seats with non-participants so the real commenters couldn't get in. Michele Masterson said,
The first FCC hearing regarding the issue was held this past February at Harvard Law School. Comcast again ran afoul of its critics when it was discovered that the company hired seat warmers
