Telecommies

Net neutrality hearing merely a ’show trail’ by Derek Hunter

Edited Highlights Version:

On Feb. 25, the Federal Communications Commission went to Harvard Law School to hold a hearing on the Internet management practices of Comcast, the largest provider of broadband Internet access in the country. Why Harvard, when the FCC is located in Washington? Because Harvard is near the district represented by Rep. Ed Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, who has been a longtime advocate for regulation of the Internet.

The hearing was a typical show trial: two panels weighted heavily with experts opposing Comcast, Verizon (the only other company to participate) and all other Internet service providers on the grounds that they can’t be trusted to do what they have done since the inception of the Internet: keep it open and available for all legal traffic. The heart of the matter was whether Comcast’s rerouting of traffic using the file-sharing software BitTorrent to less crowded areas of the Internet at peak hours constituted “blocking” traffic or was simply a reasonable Internet management technique that harmed no one while ensuring improved browsing experiences for the majority of its customers.

Without managing traffic (think timed traffic lights), ISPs say there are certain times of day when Web traffic is so high (think rush hour) that there’s a risk of not having enough bandwidth to accommodate it. Abandoning network management could end up slowing the Internet for everyone. Since bandwidth is limited (as are lanes on the freeway) and BitTorrent is designed to consume as much bandwidth as possible (think a double-wide semi), Comcast has a program that bounces a tiny minority of heavy BitTorrent users to less crowded areas of the Internet during these peak times to ensure the vast majority of users simply reading e-mails, checking news or blogging don’t have their speeds slowed to a crawl. Seems like common sense — but it’s actually not common, because it rarely happens[…]

In a perfect world, there would be more than enough bandwidth to go around and management practices wouldn’t be needed, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Bandwidth costs money, and like any commodity, its use must be maximized to be efficiently distributed. The economics of this seemed to make sense to everyone except those who believe that access to the Internet is a right[…]

One point made by witnesses is that there isn’t enough competition when it comes to ISPs. Most broadband consumers have a choice between two providers, at most, so switching services if one does something you don’t like is a possibility only for some — and a limited one, at that. There’s truth to this, but increased regulation will hurt, not help, the problem of insufficient competition. What competitor in its right mind would ever enter a heavily regulated market?

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