FCC Mulls Regulating Network Practices
April 18, 2008 | by Geoff Duncan
At an agency hearing at Stanford, FCC chairman Kevin Martin said the FCC should carefully examine what constitutes "reasonable" network management for ISPs.
At an agency hearing on broadband services held at Stanford University, FCC chairman Kevin Martin said his agency should scrutinize two primary factors when trying to evaluate whether ISPs' network management policies were "reasonable:" do application designers know what will and won't work on the network, and are consumers fully informed about the nature of the service they're purchasing, and any restrictions that may come with it.
The Stanford hearing has been characterized as a good deal more productive—and less incensed—than a similar hearing last month at Harvard University, in which cable operator Comcast was accused of filling available seats with employees in order to quell dissent and convey the appearance of support for its own policies. The hearings are being held in response to complaints that Comcast blocked traffic from peer-to-peer sharing applications like Gnutella and BitTorrent by forging reset requests; Comcast has since said it will change its network management strategy, and has forged partnerships with BitTorrent and Pando in an effort to better accommodate file-sharing technologies.
Notably, Comcast and other ISPs did not attend the Stanford meeting, although chairman Martin emphasized they had been invited to participate.
The FCC commissioners heard testimony from a number of experts, including Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, as well as panels of engineers, scholars, entrepreneurs, and even the Christian Coalition of America.
The FCC itself seems split on the issue of network regulation, with Democratic commissioner Michael Copps arguing for an expansion of the commission's 2005 Internet Policy Statement to include an "enforceable" policy of non-discrimination. Republican commissioner Robert McDowell argued that if Comcast had wanted to truly shut down file-sharing on its network, it could have done so far more effectively, and noted other nations with more-advanced broadband infrastructures are also having problems coping with mammoth amounts of P2P traffic, and that some sort of network management on the part of ISPs was a necessary reality.
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Dan on Apr 21st, 2008 at 4:51 PM:
Sometimes traffic shaping needs to be done to regulate a big network. However, the customers should be better informed on what level is acceptable and what isn't. When I am shopping for an ISP (which, unfortunately, is a field with very little choice), I expect to be told upfront if there is going to be any tampering with my Internet connection (I consider forged RST packets tampering).
Ande on Apr 21st, 2008 at 10:09 PM:
As Dan pointed out, there is often very little choice concerning which broadband provider one can go with. I've followed this, the issue of net-neutrality, for a while now and I am for there being an amount of regulation on what ISPs can do with your connection, especially if it is done in ambiguity. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I look at the situation with this economical standpoint: If there are measures to keep internet connections neutral, the change from what we know today will likely only be in cost of that connection because of continual upgrade in equipment, which is a normal product of demand. If however there is nothing to safeguard the traffic of connections from being modified, then we may see an entirely different internet than what we are used to, and will not be much benefit to consumers. Neil Berkett, CEO of Virgin Media, based in the UK, had recently admitted that their company is already doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers, and throttling down others. He specifically told the BBC and their iPlayer service, along with other providers like them that if they don't pay a premium to gain faster access to Virgin Media's customers, their service would be put into "bus lanes". The internet connections we enjoy unfettered may become broken into 'channels', requiring us to pay premiums for full access to google, and youtube, or any other favorite sites, because even as ridiculous as that sounds, there will be little to stop ISPs once they've all started implementing such policies. Even so much as charging media services like yahoo among others additional specific fees to access certain customers, I highly doubt we'll be enjoying free email accounts for very long, among other services.
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Elaine on Apr 20th, 2008 at 8:30 AM:
I can see which way the wind is blowing on this. Another thing that will be taken whether we like it or not. Not that I'm an expert about this or the ramifications of it, but if they get to control the traffic on the internet, I don't see how it can be good for us consumers. No doubt it will cost us more and more down the road, as it's all about the $$ in the U.S. anymore.