(Still trying to take a bit of a PC-Blogging-Work vacation...still hard to do entirely.)
One of the smartest things a company can do when it has attracted the threat of regulation through the commission of some purported bad act is to devise new corporate policy that bodes a change of behavior. Comcast, the nation's top cable operator, did just that today when it announced a collaborative effort with BitTorrent Inc. (BitTorrent the company, not necessarily BitTorrent the protocol) and the broader Internet community to address P2P and rich media applications and broadband network management.
Comcast further promises to migrate by year-end 2008 to a network capacity management technique that is "protocol agnostic," meaning that it will no longer necessarily target P2P protocols per se in its bandwidth management practices. In return, BitTorrent "acknowledged the need of ISPs to manage their networks, especially during times of peak congestion," according to CTO Eric Klinker.
The two companies have also agreed to work with other ISPs, other tech companies and the Internet Engineering Task Force to "develop a new distribution architecture for the efficient delivery of rich media content."
The real goal of this potentially groundbreaking move, however, is to dodge government intervention into Comcast's network management practices. Both companies said "that these technical issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the need for government intervention."
This obvious and prominent emphasis on private sector solutions to what has become a public policy controversy has sparked a fair share of skepticism. Public Knowledge CEO Gigi Sohn says that these kinds of private industry initiatives are "irrelevant" and still wants the FCC to bar the kinds of network management practices that led Comcast to mess with P2P.
Any arrangements made now would not cover any future developments in blocking, throttling or filtering that any other companies may use.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is less than enthusiastic too and wants to know why Comcast can't simply stop filtering P2P traffic now. Democratic Comissioner Michael Copps thinks that Comcast wouldn't have taken this step if the FCC hadn't gotten involved in the first place.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), Chairman of the House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee, takes a surprisingly more balanced view. He's pleased about this development and plans to monitor the evolution of this new collaboration. But, it doesn't take the wind out of his network neutrality bill.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:34 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
