I tried to go to the FCC hearing in Boston on net neutrality

Written by: Timothy Horrigan on Feb 25, 2008 11:55 PM EST

There was a dramatic FCC "en bank" hearing about net neutrality today (Feb. 25, 2008) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by the Berkman Center at the Harvard Law School (which is the World's Most Famous Law School's center for studying issues related to new media & the 'net.) I heard about it through the Boston Second Life Meetup group, and we weren't expecting to have any trouble getting into the venue, which was a large auditorium. However when I got there two police officers were blocking the stairs, because the room was overflowing. The rumor amongst us rabble who lingered in the lobby was that Verizon had paid stooges to come in two hours ahead of time and take up all the seats.

However, Comcast were the big villains of the day. In fact, they were what drove me to take the day off and (try to) attend the hearing. They have been blocking certain types of traffic, especially any type of file uploads. Their main adversary at the meeting was BitTorrent, a peer to peer networking provider (for "lawful" content only their CEO was quick to add... although it is not clear what "lawful" means these days when American democracy is just barely clinging to life.) Thanks to the paranoia about copyright violators and hackers, Peer to Peer networking is a controversial subject (and in one of the funniest non-sequiturs of the day, Comcast's Exec VP David Cohen made a big point of the fact that the Harvard Medical School has banned p2p on its networks... evidently the fact that a medical school, which has all sorts of special security and privacy concerns, bans a technology justifies a common-carrier telecom provider from doing the same.) But it's not just BitTorrent and its less commercially acceptable sisters like LimeWire etc. who are being blocked: SecondLife usage has been severely disrupted by Comcast and other cable providers.

Broadband internet in the USA is effectively a duopoly: your choices are the local cable TV company or the local "last-mile" phone company. (The median number of broadband providers in any given area is about 1.5.) Even though there are dozens of cable and phone companies... in most areas cable is provided by Comcast and phone is provided by either Verizon, Qwest or AT&T (all three of which are descendants of the old AT&T which was forcibly dismembered 25 years ago and which seems now to be just a few years away from reassembling itself.)

We have a crucial choice: do we want to keep the internet as a free many-to-many medium, or do we want to centralize it in the hands of the Comcasts of the world? The people favor the first choice, but sadly our voice is not always the one which gets heard. I actually met Comcast's Cohen in the lobby: he was obsessed with the idea that his remarks might turn up on Youtube. Even though I am sure he knew this going in, he was very upset with the fact that anyone could rip the video of his remarks and put it up on Youtube. (Although he did have the slight consolation of knowing that the video would not be available for a while— although there was a live audio feed which I listened to in the overflow areas for a couple of hours before heading back to NH.)

One factoid about Youtube: the total bandwidth used by YouTube is equivalent to 75 billion emails. To show just what a staggering amount of bytes that is... it would take the average person ALMOST A FULL MONTH to receive that many V1agra and Nigerian free-money spams. (Just kidding. My figures are slightly inaccurate.)

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Location: Cambridge, MA 02138