Stanford Hearing an Internet Wake-Up Call
April 4th, 2008 by tkarrGet ready for Round Two in the Internet’s Battle Royale of 2008. At stake is whether we should allow a handful of giant corporations to close the Web for their own gain, or whether we should put in place baseline protections that will leave our Internet open to the millions of people who use it.
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Round One occurred late February at a public event in Boston, where Comcast deployed paid seat-fillers to bar others from entering an official hearing of the Federal Communications Commission.
It’s a shame so many people missed the event. While Comcast seat-warmers snoozed, a collection of Harvard and MIT scholars, Internet advocates, industry leaders, engineers and policymakers nearly all agreed that Internet blocking has serious consequences for each and every one of us.
I say “nearly” because Comcast remains defiant. Despite recent overtures to certain file sharing companies, its executive vice president, David Cohen, continues to insist to the FCC and the world that “Comcast does not block any Web site, application or Web protocol including peer-to-peer services.”
The FCC in Silicon Valley
We’ll no doubt hear more industry spin during the second FCC hearing, scheduled to occur on the Stanford campus, April 17. Barring any new tricks from Comcast, the public should be able to attend. The venue hold’s more than 700 people. And we’ll be sure to be on guard for anyone who plans to bus in paid sleeper cells.
Stanford is the perfect place and time to take to the next level the public conversation about an Internet free of corporate gatekeepers. It’s the crossroads of Web innovation, research and investment. And the FCC has allowed at least two hours for public testimony. (The SavtheInternet.com Coalition is working with allies and partners on the ground to be sure everyone who wants to testify has a turn at the microphone.)
This is a important opportunity. It is rare for all five members of the Federal Communications Commission to leave Washington, D.C. together. It’s rarer still to have them together accepting public input in the Bay Area.
An Alarming Trend
And there’s no better time to hear from us. Comcast has been caught blocking BitTorrent, Verizon has been caught blocking text messages, AT&T wants to inspect and filter Web traffic.
In 2005 and 2006, the phone and cable companies told us they planned to block and discriminate. The top executives of major telecom companies have stated clearly in the pages of BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post that they would like to favor certain content over others.
In 2007, they showed us they meant business. In addition to Comcast’s assault on competing file-sharing applications, Verizon has blocked text messages sent by NARAL Pro-Choice America to its own members, and AT&T is hatching plans to filter and inspect all Web traffic for perceived copyright infringements.
With so much at stake at Stanford, it’s encouraging that the FCC’s first move is to quickly seek public feedback and expert counsel about the future of the Internet.
Show Up and Speak Out
That the Boston hearing was marred by Comcast’s efforts to stack the crowd in its favor — leaving concerned citizens out in the cold — demonstrates again why we can’t trust these types of companies with an Internet that is vital to our democracy and prosperity.
Those who should ultimately decide the Internet’s future are people like you and me — everyone who uses the Internet every day and in every way. That’s why every citizen needs to get involved right now.
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3. Why Internet Freedom is a Civil Rights Issue.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Will your coalition really guarantee everyone who wants to speak a chance at the microphone? Or will it only guarantee this to those who support its agenda?
April 10th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
That’s a question for the FCC. It’s their event. But we’ll be on hand to facilitate that process and see that everyone who wants to speak is given every opportunity to do so. If allowing public input is our “agenda,” so be it.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:36 am
A hearing should not be a “Battle Royal” — it should be a discussion. Going into the event with the notion that it will be some sort of political cage match — with meetings before the event to preach a specific (and one-sided) agenda to spectators — is a sure way to ensure that it is another political circus like the hearings in Boston. And it looks as if that is what’s happening.
Oddly, it is now 7 days before the event and the FCC and Stanford have not announced the list of speakers. Why, I wonder? Is it possible that Comcast and other providers are going to be sandbagged once again by a highly biased witness list?
April 11th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Those of us who could get past Comcast’s efforts to limit participation and stifle the Boston debate found a very enlightened discussion among people of varying views. Comcast’s view was and is that they can do whatever they wish with Web traffic that flows across their network — that the FCC had no role because the free market will determine what was “reasonable.” Never mind that Comcast has a virtual monopoly over markets in which their cable Internet service is available.
That many participants disagreed with this view wasn’t so much because the panel was stacked by way of some conspiracy, but simply because knowledgeable people found Comcast’s position to be dishonest and wrong.
The battle I write about isn’t over the composition of these panels, but a larger conflict over: “whether we should allow a handful of giant corporations to close the Web for their own gain, or whether we should put in place baseline protections that will leave our Internet open to the millions of people who use it.”
This is a debate that will determine the future of the Internet in America. It’s important that we get this right. That we set in place basic protections against the types of self-interested, discriminatory gatekeeping proposed — and, in Comcast’s case, imposed — by network operators.
Stanford is an important opportunity to bring the discussion to the next level. We’re happy that the FCC is now allowing input from the public — people who have as much if not more at stake in having an open Internet than many of the so-called experts seated at the table.
Free Press and many other local groups are doing our best to inform people in the area about the event, about the issue and to encourage them to come. We do this in a very public and transparent way. We prevent no one from participating who might have a position in opposition to ours. (Compare these methods to Comcast’s in Boston).
You’re free to call the hearing a “circus” before it even occurs — stacked against a lowly underdog like Comcast — but then who’s really sandbagging?
April 11th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
No; the panels were stacked. The views of the speakers were well known before the sessions began (they’d been widely published before), and the one person on either of the panels who was both technically knowledgeable and experienced in network management — Richard Bennett — discovered just before the opening of the hearing that the organizers had mysteriously “lost” his slides.
It’s no wonder that Comcast tried to reserve a few seats in the hall for supporters! Free Press was trying to pack the hall with Comcast’s detractors (who hissed, booed, and were otherwise rude during the hearing).
And you yourself are obviously quite biased. Look at the way you are framing the debate: “whether we should allow a handful of giant corporations to close the Web for their own gain, or whether we should put in place baseline protections that will leave our Internet open to the millions of people who use it.” Talk about a one-sided way of presenting the question! The fact is that what Comcast was doing — regulating traffic on its network and preventing abuse — was perfectly reasonable and was in no way “closing the Web.”
Yes, the Boston hearing was a “circus.” And the agenda that it was designed to railroad through — without actual examination of the issues — is one that actually will create a “virtual monopoly” for telephone companies and cable providers by driving independent ISPs out of business.
The speakers for the Stanford hearing have not yet been announced, which is a bit suspicious; why keep the names under wraps? The most likely answer: it’ll be another stacked, one sided slate.
April 12th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Were you at the Boston hearing? I didn’t think so.
The only person who believes that Richard Bennett had exclusive and superior technical and network knowledge is Richard Bennett … and now, you.
Look very closely at the impressive list of panelists there and tell me whether you’re willing to tell each of them that they know very little about network management.
Look at the list and tell me how the Boston panels were stacked in favor of Net Neutrality.
On the first panel sat Tom Tauke, Dave Cohen (both highly-paid and experienced lobbyists, one a former congressman the other a former chief of staff for the now governor of Pennsylvania) and a top law professor. All of them were being paid to prepare for their panels.
On the public-interest side was a young lawyer who’d never testified before the FCC and two law professors who prepared the night before and took time off from their teaching schedules to come. One panelist Marvin Ammori said: “If I were a betting man, I’d bet on Tauke, Cohen and Yoo. That’s where the money was riding.”
I also understand that Comcast chose two people to participate on the second panel (Bennett and Clark). Whose fault is it that Richard Bennett failed to convince anyone (at least those of us who were awake)? And Dave Clark found Comcast’s actions to be so indefensible that he ended up blasting them.
Comcast could have put up their own internal engineers, but apparently couldn’t find one willing to take the heat in public. What does that tell you?
As for the hissing, booing and rudeness, listen to the audio of the hearing and tell me where exactly this happens. Give me the minute and second.
Had you been there, you would have heard Bennett claim that the data failed to prove that Comcast had done anything to cause this controversy. As I recall, this claim elicited an incredulous gasp from some in the crowd.
After so much evidence has been put on the table, what did you expect? But there was no hissing and booing.
The anti-Net Neutrality position clearly lost in this debate. Now (surprise, surprise) the losers are crying foul and shuffling home with the ball in their hands.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I listened to the Boston hearing via the audio Webcast and later reviewed the video. Yes, I think that Richard Bennett is brilliant. He was, among other things, one of the developers of ARCNet — the very first widely deployed local area networks — and then of the twisted pair Ethernet that all of us use every day. He also worked at Texas Instruments on the IEEE 802.5 Token Ring network, and now does design work for Actiontec — the world’s #1 manufacturer of DSL modems. Engineers in the world of networking have a huge amount of respect for Richard, and that respect is well earned. If you weren’t able to fathom the details of his talk (which was only moderately technical), then this constitutes an admission that you do not know enough about the technical issues surrounding P2P, BitTorrent, or network management to comment on them.
In any event, the Boston panels were “stacked,” and it was clear that this was so well before the event. The only two speakers who were not blatantly anti-Comcast were the one from Comcast itself (who, alas, was an executive and not a technical person — a decision that was surely made by Comcast’s rather inept PR people) and Richard Bennett (who was not pro-Comcast but a “neutral” technologist). All of the others had axes to grind. And, yes, there was hissing and booing of Comcast. You can hear it on the audio. Comcast didn’t “lose” a “debate,” because there really was no debate. It was not a debate; it was a circus. And it’s clear who were the lions and who were the Christians.