FCC Mulls Regulating Network Practices

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.