Update at 3:10 p.m. PST: CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Federal Communications Commission chief Kevin Martin on Monday targeted Comcast's contention that delaying peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic serves user interests, appearing to sympathize with the cable company's critics.
Through pointed questioning at a public hearing at Harvard Law School here, Martin, a Republican, seemed to be pushing a two-pronged agenda: Internet service providers like Comcast should be as transparent as possible about manipulating network traffic, and consumers should have the freedom to, in effect, get what they pay for.
But at the end of the event, which, all told, lasted nearly six hours, Martin told reporters he still hadn't made up his mind about whether Comcast had done anything more than "reasonable" network management.
The chairman was also unable to predict when the Commission would reach a decision on Comcast's conduct and the broader question of constraints on network operators' traffic shaping practices, except to say, "I think it's important we try to act very quickly."
The FCC convened Monday's hearing as part of an investigation into Comcast's practice of stalling uploads to BitTorrent protocol clients. It's considering two petitions--one from public-interest groups and one from the peer-to-peer video-sharing service Vuze--that ask the FCC to forcibly stop Comcast's BitTorrent throttling and to make new rules defining what constitutes "reasonable" network management by Internet service providers.
The whole debate an extension of the years-old tussle over whether Net neutrality regulations, which would prohibit network operators from prioritizing traffic as they wish, are necessary to safeguard the Internet's historically open architecture.
Congress is also continuing to consider such moves. Democratic Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), whose district lies near the site of Monday's hearing, has proposed a new bill that would discourage, though not outright prohibit, Internet service providers from engaging in "unreasonable discriminatory favoritism" of content on their pipes. He warned commissioners in a speech at the start of Monday's event to take with a grain of salt any broadband providers' professions of "reasonable" network management in the interest of consumer welfare.
