FCC hears calls for net neutrality from lawyers and executives
Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and proponent of net neutrality, spoke at the FCC hearing on broadband network management practices Thursday, April 17, in Dinkelspiel Auditorium.
Barbara van Schewick, on screen, spoke at the FCC hearing on broadband network management practices.
BY DAN STOBER AND ARIELLE LASKY
Net neutrality—the notion that everyone has a right to equal access to the Internet—should be a bedrock principle of life on the web, Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and intellectual property expert, told the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday as the FCC commissioners took the stage at Dinkelspiel Auditorium for a daylong public hearing.
In fact, Lessig said, net neutrality should be to the Internet what the First Amendment is to the U.S. Constitution.
An audience of several hundred gathered to listen and participate in a lively dialogue before the five commissioners. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the Silicon Valley location, the crowd was overwhelmingly in tune with Lessig's views, expressing little sympathy for the big Internet service providers.
The hearing at Stanford was a followup to one held at Harvard in February. That event drew wide attention after Comcast, one of the nation's largest Internet providers, admitted that it hired people to fill seats, a move that prevented some members of the public from attending.
Comcast was under scrutiny for interrupting the net traffic of users of BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing program that consumes large chunks of Internet bandwidth. Comcast first denied the tactics, then said they were intended only to reduce traffic on its networks. Critics charged that the company in essence attacked a method of movie and video distribution that competes with Comcast's own business plans.
Comcast was invited to appear at the Stanford hearing, along with the other big network operators, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon, but all declined, according to FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin.
Last year, Verizon Wireless stirred up the net neutrality issue by rejecting a request from NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, to make Verizon's mobile network available for a text-message program.
Lessig is the founder and co-director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. He is also on the board of Free Press, an organization that filed a complaint with the FCC about the Comcast/BitTorrent episode.
At Thursday's hearing, he warned the FCC commissioners of the dangers of letting control of the web slip into the hands of giant cable and phone companies, which together provide more than 90 percent of U.S. residential Internet connections. He quoted Adam Smith, the 18th-century champion of capitalism, who declared that any gathering of the producers of goods would end in a conspiracy against the public.
Lessig dismissed the suggestion that the big companies be left to regulate themselves. It is not a matter of trust, he argued, but of the basic nature of companies that exist to provide economic gain for their owners. "A tiger has a nature. That nature is not one you trust with your child," he said. Likewise, a company cannot be trusted to follow good public policy, he said.
Stanford alumnus Brett Glass—he received his master's degree in electrical engineering—brought a different perspective to the hearing. As the CEO of Lariat.net, a wireless Internet service provider in Laramie, Wyo., Glass argued that peer-to-peer traffic is more than a free-speech issue. The expense of providing low-cost bandwidth for pirated music and videos is potentially fatal to small Internet providers, he said. Even legal video sharing over peer-to-peer shifts the cost of distribution from the content provider (the BBC, for example) to the network operator, he said. A customer's computer may receive one copy of a video and then send out 100.
"And we have to pay the freight," Glass said in an interview after the hearing. Because of these costs, Lariat.net does not allow peer-to-peer file-sharing in its lower-tier contracts.
Barbara van Schewick, assistant professor of law and co-director of the Center for Internet and Society, also was invited to address the commission. Armed with a doctorate in computer science as well as her law degree, she laid out three main points. First, she said, "Allowing network providers to single out specific applications [such as BitTorrent] harms user choice and innovation." Second, even if there is disclosure that a network operator is interfering with data traffic, the market will not correct the problem by itself. Finally, she said, the FCC must "clarify that singling out specific applications is not reasonable network management."
Van Schewick told the story of a Stanford graduate student who developed a successful peer-to-peer video application. He presented the product to several firms, and though the product was highly innovative, each firm took a pass on the opportunity to fund it. "The fear that network providers would block it was one of the top issues" in those decisions, she said. The potential funders realized that "the more likely it was to succeed, the more likely it was to be blocked."
Van Schewick noted that the current flat-rate pricing structure for ISP consumers incentivizes companies to block high bandwidth rather than upgrade their network.
"This year it may be P2P, next year it may be YouTube, and next year it may be some exciting program" yet to be invented, she said.
"Any traffic-limiting tools should apply to all applications equally," she argued.
Jason Devitt, chief executive officer of SkyDeck, spoke of net neutrality and cell phones. His company helps users "take back control of their cell phones and cell phone bills." Holding up both his cell phone and laptop, he explained that the two computing devices are treated very differently: Even though both connect to the same broadband wireless network, he has much less control over his cell phone. He can't track what happens inside his phone, he said, because he can't install applications on it.
"If this were a Dickens novel, I would be the ghost of Internet's future," said Devitt, positing that the neutrality taken for granted on laptops and desktops will soon disappear. "Quit worrying about if the network is neutral, because soon you won't be able to tell."
Harold Feld, senior vice president of the nonprofit Media Access Project, suggested that without net neutrality, activity on the Internet "will become innovation by permission, speech by permission."
According to Feld, Comcast's actions are not about controlling access to inappropriate material. A tester at the Media Access Project, attempting to download the King James Bible, failed 276 times in 300 attempts. Downloads of adult material, on the other hand, "did not fail once," according to Feld.
Gregory L. Rosston, deputy director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, suggested that metered pricing, which charges consumers for the amount of bandwidth they consume (rather than a flat fee), could be a good solution. Though it might not be popular, Rosston argued that other consumption works that way: "I don't want metered pricing for my gas, but I have to pay for it—it's a scare resource."
He also challenged the idea that "you can only charge the end-user customer, not anyone else." One option would be to shift the expense for a specific transaction—"have different people pay for different things," much like an 800 phone number, he said.
Ben Scott, policy director at Free Press, framed the issues with two opposing visions for the Internet: open or closed. "Few choices in the history of the FCC carry as much weight as this one," he told the commissioners. "So—no pressure." The audience laughed.
Arielle Lasky is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.