The FCC held today its field hearing on broadband network management practices (audio webcast available here) and during the first panel of the hearing Comcast got beat up a little bit for its P2P throttling practices. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), in whose home turf, Cambridge, the hearing is taking place, kicked off the hearing with a warning to the carriers.
"The Internet is as much mine and yours as it is AT&T's, Verizon’s and Comcast," Markey said. "The key question for safeguarding the Internet is the recognition that...the carriers don't provide services. They provide access to the Internet."
Displaying his usual flair for colorful quotes, Markey said "This is no country for old bandwidth," a movie allusion that produced a few chuckles. Acknowledging the groan-inducing potential of the phrase, he added that the play on words was "better here in the academic setting than 'there will be blood.'"
Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps said that "the time has come for a principled enforceable policy of non-discrimination at the FCC." He called for case-by-case adjudication of discrimination complaints at the regulatory agency. (Right now, the FCC does not have a process for reviewing claims of broadband carrier discrimination.)
Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa offered a demo of how his company's P2P platform works. "We are against network management practices with no boundaries," BianRosa said. If Comcast can discriminate against P2P applications, it can also cook up a rationale for interfering with other bandwidth-intensive applications, such as FTP, BianRosa said. "We think this is equivalent to spitting in the wind."
BianRosa rejected Comcast's defense that it is merely delaying P2P traffic rather than blocking it. "Let's be clear here. We compete with Comcast for delivery of video over the net," he said. "In this horse race, Comcast owns the racetrack. They also own the horse. We've been told that they're slowing down our horse by only two seconds."
Columbia's Tim Wu offered no detailed specifics about what the FCC should do except "whatever we think reasonable network management is, it should not include blocking lawful applications" especially secret blocking of lawful applications. "This is the simple rule" that the FCC should implement.
Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler spoke in lofty terms about the structure of the broadband industry and whether competition exists among broadband providers. Ultimately, however, broadband providers have the opportunity and incentive to extract excess profits from Internet traffic and high-value applications, Benkler concluded.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin pushed the speakers on the concept of "transparency," or ensuring that customers know what kind of services are subject to network management. Virtually all of the speakers agreed that user agreements should spell out what kinds of traffic shaping the broadband providers use.
Verizon representative Tom Tauke said "transparency is important." One problem, though, is how to make consumers aware of the complex network management activities. "We're trying to take some of our 30-page documents and make them understandable for the consumer."
Another problem is that too much disclosure invites the bad guys to game the filtering processes that keep out spam and other Internet nuisances. "Every minute of every hour of every day there are those who are delivering spam and attacks on the network," Tauke said, "so you don’t want to have so much disclosure" that the bad guys can unlock the network.
Chairman Martin said it was "odd" that Comcast would limit its users' ability to fully utilize the bandwidth they are promised when they purchase service tiers. Comcast EVP David Cohen responded that "I don't think we’re restraining customers from using the service," noting that the company's acceptable use policy, which was recently updated to be more clear about P2P management, warns that certain applications wouldn't be permitted. "It's always sold as a shared network...with the provision that use of the network won't degrade the use of the network for other customers."
Cohen also sought to clarify the misconceptions surrounding Comcast's P2P traffic management techniques, stressing that Comcast only delays P2P when network congestion is high and even then only delays uploads and not downloads. "Comcast does not block any website or application or protocol including P2P. Period," he said. "What we are doing is a limited form of network management, objectively based on a bandwidth consumptive protocol during limited periods of congestion."
Vuze's BianRosa disputed the characterization of Comcast's P2P management technique as a "delay" as opposed to blocking P2P altogether. "Studies show that if you delay an application, even just a little bit, people will stop using it," he said.
Comcast's Cohen said that problems should not occur when applications are used the way they are "designed to be used." Columbia's Wu said that this philosophy strikes at the heart of this P2P filtering controversy. "The whole problem is that Comcast shouldn't be telling people how they should applications."
Copps asked whether the FCC has the authority to impose forfeiture fines against broadband providers found to be engaging in discrimination when it comes to network management practices. Not surprisingly, Cohen said no, "the Commission does not have the authority to impose a forfeiture fine."
Whatever the case may be, everyone, even Comcast's critics, agreed that network management of some kind has to take place or networks won't run. The issue is, how far that network managment goes. "There's nothing wrong with network management. Every network must be managed or no network would function," Cohen said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:40 PM | Print | Comments (0)Not to pick on creative thinkers, but the New York Times put up a really interesting chart over the weekend that purports to graphically depict the cyclical rise and fall of movie theater box office revenues. It's very beautiful, but can anybody tell me what it says?
(Hat tip to Jason Kottke)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:42 PM | Print | Comments (0)It's one thing when a government censors what its own people can access on the Internet, but it's another thing altogether to block the entire world's access to content. That's what happened earlier today when Pakistani censors, fiddling around with content filters, ended up hijacking YouTube's web server address, shutting down global access to the hugely popular site.
Pakistani authorities were supposedly trying to block access to YouTube because the site featured the famed Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammad that many Muslims find offensive. A trailer for a film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, which isn't favorable to Islam, was also cited as a reason for shutting off the popular video sharing site. Check out this statement by Reporters Without Borders condemning the country's move to ban YouTube.
The global shut-down of YouTube was by all accounts an accident by the engineers implementing the filter. Still, it goes to show that messing with the Internet is almost never a good idea.
As an aside, I was hunting for videos from Saturday Night Live's most recent broadcast, its first non-repeat in many months, when I had trouble connecting to YouTube. I assumed that something was wrong with my Internet connection or computer or both. But the folks on Twitter let me know right away that they too had trouble with YouTube and I knew then that something was up.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post stated that Turkey, not Pakistan, was the culprit in shutting down YouTube. This mistake was a result of blogging during the Oscars. Apologies.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:55 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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