House Panel To Vet Net Neutrality
Committee To Hear From All Sides Of Internet Legislation Debate
By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 3/10/2008 1:11:00 PM
Washington – A House panel on Tuesday will hear conflicting testimony on whether Congress needs to regulate cable and phone companies to prevent discriminatory behavior against Internet-based content and applications.
The session will be held by the House Judiciary Committee Antitrust Task Force at a time when the Federal Communications Commission has Comcast Corp. under investigation for allegedly blocking BitTorrent uploads during hours of peak network congestion. Comcast admitted to delaying some traffic as a reasonable network management tool.
Some witnesses will voice support for passage of a network neutrality law, pointing to allegations against cable, wireless and traditional phone companies as ample justification for close supervision of their network management practices.
“Today, in this age of deregulation, there are no legal limitations on how Internet accessproviders may provide access. They are free to discriminate, and we have already seen this happen with Comcast’s handicap of certain applications. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Yale Law School assistant visiting professor Susan Crawford says in prepared testimony obtained by Multichannel News on Monday.
Michele Combs, vice president of communications for the Christian Coalition of America, plans to echo that view, using Comcast in a “what if” example to stress the need for congressional intervention.
“It has...been pointed out that Comcast’s discriminatory conduct just so happens to block access to video distribution applications that compete with Comcast’s own programming. If Comcast were to create a Christian family channel, would Washington allow it to block access to a competing product from the Christian Coalition?” Combs says in her prepared testimony.
Christopher S. Yoo, professor of law and communication at the University of Pennsylvania, says that a one-size-fits all approach to network neutrality could backfire on its advocates.
“The likely difficulty is illustrated by the positions taken by the Christian Coalition. On the one hand, the Christian Coalition has endorsed network neutrality. On the other hand, it has asked the FCC to preserve network providers’ ability to screen out child pornography and obscenity and to refer any instances that they may discover to law enforcement authorities.”
The better approach, Yoo argues, is “an after-the-fact, case-by-case approach to regulating network neutrality. Such a position would have strong support from Supreme Court precedent.”
Rick Carnes, president Songwriters Guild of America, says that a net neutrality law could frustrate legitimate efforts to combat content piracy on the Web.
“I believe the current proposals to regulate the Internet–whether from the FCC’s perspective or the antitrust perspective–are more likely to harm than to help the fight against music piracy, and therefore I suggest you proceed with great caution,” Carnes says.
Damian Kulash, lead vocalist and guitarist the group OK Go, is scheduled to testify.
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