FCC’s Stanford Hearing on Broadband Practices

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FCC’s Stanford Hearing on Broadband Practices

By CircleID Reporter
April 18, 2008 Views: 14,580 Add Comment

About 300 people attended to the net neutrality hearing Thursday hearing which began with testimony from Larry Lessig, a Stanford Law School professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society.

BBC reports: “The meeting was called by the FCC in reaction to the news that US net firm Comcast had been exposed as managing traffic by stopping some of its 13m customers uploading files to BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The FCC has started a formal investigation to see if Comcast merits a fine for its actions.”

Wired reports: “With his standard flair for stunning PowerPoint presentations, Lessig made the case that an open internet made possible the massive economic gains of the 1990s and that network operators who want to change the internet in order to create fast and slow lanes need to prove that such a ‘smart’ network would actually be better than an internet where the intelligence lies at the edges.”

Economist reports: “Once again, alarmists are issuing dire warnings about the internet collapsing under the weight of its traffic. But that’s nothing new: they’ve been doing so since the 1990s. Bob Metcalfe, who invented the Ethernet protocol for local area networks, once claimed that the internet was about to be overwhelmed by e-mail traffic. That was in 1996.”

Below is Lessig’s testimony on Thursday:

By CircleID Reporter

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