FCC: No plans for a Comcast-BitTorrent hearing at Stanford

WASHINGTON--You may have heard that the Federal Communications Commission is plotting a Stanford University "do-over" of a recent public Net neutrality hearing, where Comcast paid people to stand in line. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin

(Credit: Federal Communications Commission)

At a meeting with reporters at agency headquarters here, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin on Tuesday dismissed those reports, saying nothing is planned. He suggested that the rumors may have spread because he's making a solo trip to Palo Alto, Calif., on Friday to speak to a law school conference.

Similarly, a Stanford representative told CNET News.com that she wasn't sure how the rumors started and that she is unaware of any FCC hearing being planned.

The Republican chairman also said the regulators aren't investigating Comcast's hiring of line standers for the Cambridge, Mass., event, which focused in large part on complaints that the cable company throttles BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic in unreasonable ways.

"It's usually more interesting for people to attend on their own without being paid to do so, but we're not investigating anything," Martin said.

The gossip blog Valleywag reported last week that because of that "miniscandal," the FCC was planning a "do-over" hearing at Stanford.

Hired line standing, of course, is a veritable profession in Washington, and Comcast has since acknowledged paying some people to arrive early and hold spaces for local employees who wanted to attend the FCC field hearing.

In this case, however, public-interest groups that filed a complaint against Comcast's admitted delaying of BitTorrent file-sharing uploads cried foul because some of those warm bodies were never, in fact, replaced by employees and were even caught dozing during the multihour event.

Martin did say the agency learned a lot at its Harvard Law School hearing last Monday and hasn't ruled out the possibility of staging another one at some point.

"Certainly, California could end up being a good place to end up doing it," he said in response to a question posed by CNET News.com at the roundtable meeting with reporters.

An FCC representative followed up with this e-mail message: "The chairman never indicated that there would or would not be additional hearings, only indicated that there may be additional hearings. No decision has yet been made."

[perfectblue97]

Mixed feelings

While I support the idea of net neutrality, I can't help but feel that it is the right of a network to shape the traffic across infrastructure that it paid for so as to best suit its paying customers.

I don't want to pay a premium for VOIP and IPTV services just to find that my service is degraded because a bunch of frat-boys down the street on a different ISP are clogging up my ISP's routers downloading pirate movies.

[spruceman]

Re: Mixed Feelings

And what if the ISP is shaping traffic by throttling down your IPTV because they think some hi-def movie you're watching is clogging up their network? Why is the assumption made so often that folks doing large downloads are pirating? There are many perfectly legal bitrate-intensive downloads. Should I assume that everyone driving down my street more than 4 times a day is a burglar?

Oh well! No sense in the FCC holding more hearings on the subject if Comcast is going to pack the hearing room ahead of time and it prevents the general public from commenting. I guess the FCC might need to "shape the traffic" across the hearing-room infrastructure so alternative views can be heard.

[CmdrRickHunter]

false advertising

I'm behind net neutrality because it forces ISP transparency. You worry about paying for premium VoiP and losing it because some else is pirating movies. I point out this should not happen. It happens, but not because of the frat boys. It happens because the ISP marketing divisions have gotten away with spinning an ABSURD tale. Once ISPs have to sell the bandwidth they actually have, instead of selling fantasy bandwidth, straight up economics will solve your little problem. The problem is ISPs are selling 7/1 megabit connections which they don't actually have. They always reasoned "oh, people can't actually use that much." Well we can now. They need to adjust accordingly.