FCC chief grills Comcast on BitTorrent blocking

[Lite]

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 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.

The FCC convened the hearing at Harvard Law School as part of an investigation into Comcast's practice of stalling uploads to BitTorrent protocol clients. It's considering more broadly whether new rules are necessary to define and limit what constitutes "reasonable" network management by Internet service providers. It's an extension of the years-old debate over Net neutrality regulations, which would prohibit network operators from prioritizing traffic as they wish.

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.

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[eBait]

Amen.

[dock98]

go get em.

[temp123]

too bad what the fcc is doing will only discourage the throttling, not prohibit it