US Open Internet access hotly debated before FCC

Last October, Comcast practices were made known through the efforts of Topolski and others. Following that public revelation, Vuze, Inc.,a Palo Alto, California company that uses P2P to legally distribute video content, alleged in a complaint last November that Comcast hampered traffic between users without notice, violating the Internet's tradition of equal treatment of traffic. Vuze and Pando compete. The two FCC hearings are part of an effort to determine if Comcast's practice of degrading P2P connections on its network goes beyond "reasonable network management."

Vuze testified at the first hearing in Boston but not Thursday at Stanford, although its lawyer Jay Monohan said the company has been running a huge test of P2P blocking and offers a Windows plug-in on its Web site for consumers to use to help Vuze gather evidence about how ISPs are "throttling P2P traffic."

Topolski charges that Comcast's practice of using transmission control protocol (TCP) reset flags to tear down P2P connections as away of managing network traffic is both rare and harmful.

"Every router has inherent ability to handle congestion without having to resort to out of band or non-standard methods," he said.

Independent engineer George Ou, who has been prolific blogger arguing that the vast majority of P2P files are pirated content,testified that adding bandwidth capacity or speeding file sharing will not make network management issues disappear. Japan has the world's fastest and fattest fiber-to-home network and still video and other P2P files clog its network.

"Since P2P applications use disproportionately large amounts of bandwidth, it's only fair to throttle them either through TCP resets or conventional protocol prioritization built in to routers," said Ou, who claimed he has no ties to ISPs.

Jon Peterson, co-director of the real-time applications and infrastructure (RAI) for the Internet Engineering Task Force, said among IETF volunteer members there is "no consensus on how to manage in elastic and elastic applications" and as a technical body not apolitical one it hasn't an opinion on public policy regarding the Internet.

The hearing drew diverse groups in support of net neutrality from Free Press, which in two years has collected 1.5 million signatures on its Save the Internet petition, to the Christian Coalition of America,the largest and most active conservative grassroots political organization in the US.

"We believe that organizations such as the Christian Coalition should be able to continue to use the Internet to communicate with our members and with a worldwide audience without a phone or a cable company snooping in on our communications and deciding whether to allow a particular communication to proceed, slow it down, block it, or offer to speed it up if the author pays extra to be in the 'fast lane'," said Michele Combs, vice president of communications of the CCA.

Three years ago the FCC established four principals supporting open Internet access but has not established any specific regulations.Meanwhile despite the Supreme Court confirming the FCC's right to regulate ISPs, Comcast has challenged the FCC's authority.