FCC ready to curb ISP traffic management

At Monday's hearing, David L. Cohen, an executive vice president at Comcast, said his firm interrupts file-sharing traffic in a neighborhood when it's so heavy that it would slow other kinds of traffic in the area.

Cohen said the practice creates a largely imperceptible delay when a certain type of traffic — say, an upload of video — is rerouted elsewhere on the network, but is not blocked.

"We have chosen the least intrusive method to help the vast majority of our customers avoid service degradation," Cohen said.

"There is nothing wrong with network management — every broadband network is managed," he said. "Our customers want us to fight spam and viruses, and they want us to fight congestion," he said.

Tom Tauke, executive vice president at Verizon, said his company does not handle bottlenecks in the same way because its network architecture is configured differently than Comcast's, making such management steps unnecessary.

Critics said Comcast's network management policy amounts to blocking, rather than simply delaying traffic.

"Whatever we think reasonable network management is, it should not include blocking lawful applications," said Timothy Wu, a Columbia University law professor credited with coining the term Net neutrality. "It should not include discrimination against applications, and blocking of lawful applications."

Wu said the issue of disclosure of network practices is crucial for Internet firms — many of them startups — that must rely on venture capital funding for survival. If investors learn that major broadband providers will delay or block a particular firm's Internet transmissions, they'll take their money elsewhere, he said.

Another speaker at the hearing, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., has sponsored legislation that would make Net neutrality the law. While acknowledging the need to manage networks, Markey warned that a failure to rein in Internet service providers could turn the Internet into a tool for powerful interests, rather than a means of free-flowing communication.

"The beauty of the Internet is that it's got a wonderfully chaotic, evolving nature," Markey said.

Markey chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet.

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