CAMBRIDGE - Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin warned yesterday that Internet service providers can't block consumers from using lawful Internet activities in the name of providing better service.
"While networks may have legitimate network issues and practices," Martin said, "that does not mean that they can arbitrarily block access to certain network services."
Martin spoke at a packed lecture hall at Harvard Law School, where all five FCC commissioners held a public hearing on how Internet companies manage their networks. It's a question that has sparked a new debate about the concept of "net neutrality" - the idea that Internet providers should treat all digital data exactly the same.
Proponents of the idea have long pushed for a federal law to mandate strict neutrality, so Internet providers won't deliberately slow down or degrade Internet services from rival companies. But Internet providers say there are legitimate reasons for treating some kinds of Internet content differently from others.
The argument took on new urgency in late 2007. That's when Comcast Corp., one of the nation's biggest Internet companies, admitted that it sometimes delays Internet traffic that uses the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent. Many Internet users rely on BitTorrent for transferring large files, such as computer games or movies.
Comcast executive vice president David Cohen said that BitTorrent users can soak up a disproportional share of total network capacity. He said Comcast limits BitTorrent transmissions only when they threaten to slow down the entire network. "All of this is designed to have a minimal, virtually imperceptible effect on a small number of users," Cohen said.
But Vuze Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., filed a complaint with the FCC last year, challenging Comcast's delaying tactics. Vuze uses BitTorrent to distribute Internet videos from the Showtime cable channel and the Public Broadcasting Service, among others. Vuze chief executive Gilles BianRosa said that Comcast, which is also a leading cable TV provider, has an incentive to damage Vuze by limiting customer access to BitTorrent files. And he said that other Internet providers are also restricting BitTorrent transfers. "We are not against reasonable network management," said BianRosa. "We are against network management without boundaries."
BianRosa's complaint was backed by several witnesses at the hearing, who said that Internet companies should be barred from any traffic-management policies that discriminate between different kinds of Internet data. Calling Comcast's arguments "technical-sounding nonsense," Marvin Ammori, general counsel for Internet advocacy group Free Press, called on the FCC to bar Comcast's current BitTorrent policy. "Comcast has to use nondiscriminatory means to manage its bandwidth."
Ammori found an ally in FCC commissioner Michael Copps. "The time has come for a specific enforceable provision of nondiscrimination" on the Internet, Copps said.
Martin has long argued that the FCC already has the power to stop Internet companies from unfair data discrimination. "I think we have the authority already to enforce our current network neutrality principles," he said in a Sunday interview. In the same interview, Martin said he was open to the idea that Comcast's limits on BitTorrent might be a legitimate network management tool. But, he added, "if these are reasonable steps, they should be able to disclose what occurs and tell people ahead of time."
At yesterday's hearing, Martin said little about the legitimacy of Comcast's policy, but repeatedly criticized the company for not disclosing it sooner. The company publicly admitted it limited BitTorrent traffic only after the Associated Press ran a story last October demonstrating the practice.
Several witnesses at the hearing said that net neutrality is a sideshow, and the real problem is the lack of competition in the broadband Internet market. "The commission would do well to reexamine broadband policies with the goal of jump-starting competition," said US Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Most US communities have at most two broadband providers, said Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler. This enables the providers to throttle competition, so government is forced to use regulations like net neutrality to keep Internet providers from abusing their power.
"Net neutrality . . . is merely a partial solution to the failure of the market," said Benkler. "What we need is robust, open competition." Benkler said the US government should force cable and phone companies to lease access to the wires they've installed in millions of homes. Rival companies could use the wires to deliver competing broadband services, thus creating many more broadband companies.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
