FCC at Stanford: Winners and Not-so-winners

If you read my post over at GigaOM you can see what I thought was the biggest takeaway from Thursday’s open FCC meeting at Stanford. Now that I’ve finally walked all the way across campus to find my car (could there have been any place in the Bay area with more congested parking and access?), here’s a quick take on the winners and losers not-so-winners from the latest skirmish in net neutrality:

WINNERS

1) Kevin Martin, FCC Chairman. By bending over backwards politically and hosting a meeting on Larry Lessig’s turf, Martin gets to claim he is truly an objective chairman, in search of only the truth. Now back to Washington, where he can scuttle the Skype wireless Carterphone petition.

2) Larry Lessig, Stanford Law prof. See here for more explanation. (Or watch video on Lessig’s own blog.) The only slip in Lessig’s presentation was an arcane dip into a somewhat semantic difference between Lessig’s views on net neutrality, and the recent bill proposed by Mass. Rep. Ed Markey. If the leading net neutrality proponents have differences, shouldn’t they work them out internally? Saying he doesn’t agree completely with Markey just muddles the pro-net neutrality message, something you will never see happening from the other side.

3) Jason Devitt, CEO, Skydeck. One of the newest spokespersons on the net neutrality side, Devitt made some great points Thursday about how PCs are open platforms, but cell phones are not. Expect to see more of this argument, following the Carterphone lead set by folks like Skype’s Christopher Libertelli.

4) Robert “Robb” Topolski, Comcast-blocking hunter. It’s one thing to be geeky enough to spot and call out a major service provider for its misdeeds. It’s quite another to appear at a very public forum and not just hold your own ground (impressing seasoned tech reporters in the process), but to be confident enough to smack down an FCC commissioner, in this case Republican Robert McDowell.

While most of the reports out of the meeting cited Topolski’s comments toward Comcast, he added onto his presentation by pointedly and publicly correcting McDowell on the latter’s misconceptions about Comcast’s practices (McDowell had tried to assert during his remarks that Comcast was only blocking uploads, which Topolski disagreed with).

NOT-SO-WINNERS

(I was going to call this section “losers” but that seemed a bit harsh; let’s just say folks in this category failed to impress.)

1) Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate, FCC commissioners. Not much original thought from these two commishes — they could just simply step up to the podium, and say, “big business has told us not to regulate anything in telecom,” and sit down. Whenever you hear politicians, lobbyists or bureaucrats trot out the line about the fear of “unintended consequences” when referring to potential legislation, you know where those words are coming from — big campaign contributors who don’t want Washington mucking around in their profit streams. These two deserved more than the light boos they got. There are valid opinions on the side of lesser regulation, but merely citing the fear of “unintended consequences” isn’t enough. Or shouldn’t be, for regulators at the highest level.

2) Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. Conspicuous by their absence, the big carriers are just making it easy for people to say they aren’t interested in finding a solution to the net neutrality question, only getting their way.

FLAK JACKET AWARD

1) George Ou, independent network engineer (who used to have a well-read blog over at ZDNet). With all the telco folks missing in action, poor George was left alone to defend the ideas of net-management-not-net-neutrality, and I thought he didn’t do his own past writing justice.

Like other folks I talked to in the audience (including neighbor and Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian, who had similar comments during his presentation), I’d rather see a different approach to these debates, maybe in a format that allows for more technical give-and-take. Like many folks with more technical details to discuss, Ou seemed handicapped against rhetoric pros like Harold Feld. Too bad, because this debate needs more folks with network expertise, and less D.C. lobbyist types.

FCC at Stanford: No BitTorrent?

The FCC just released the lineup of speakers for tomorrow’s open meeting at Stanford, and while the list includes a lot of interesting folks who probably have lots to say about network management, I’m a little puzzled as to why BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen isn’t on the list.

Maybe he wasn’t asked, maybe he said no — no idea right now, but it seems like a huge missed opportunity since BT is sort-of responsible for the whole Comcast-blocking mess in the first place. (But then the two firms are BFF now, right? Right.)

Anyway, should be good theater. Hope we get in!

UPDATE: Looks like Comcast is skipping the party, too. Maybe this is why — they didn’t want to have to face an angry Dave!

FCC at Stanford: Lessig, Devitt and Who Else?

The FCC hasn’t released a list of speakers yet for Thursday’s open meeting at Stanford, so we’re trying to find out who the panelists will be. So far, the only names we’ve heard with any certainty are law prof Larry Lessig and Jason Devitt, of wireless startup Skydeck.

Anyone else? We do know that Google’s Rick Whitt and Skype’s Christopher Libertelli will be in the audience, taking up seats that otherwise might go to the newest Comcast employees.

UPDATE: According to DeVitt’s spokespeople, other panelists for Thursday include Harold Feld and Ben Scott from the Free Press. Quite the busy week for Harold, who spent Tuesday on Capitol Hill testifying at the 700 MHz hearings (where he invoked Passover themes in an entertaining argument to “let my spectrum go,” or something along those lines).

Astroturfs, Now Fighting for Cable

Is there such a shortage of news around telecom public policy that normally respectable information outlets still fall so easily for astroturf announcements? If you are a Comcast lobbyist you just have to love the official sound of the lead graf in this non-news missive from IDG “news” service, which asserts that “a coalition of seven civil rights groups” is now banding together to fight off the resurrection of network neutrality, mainly in reference to the recent FCC hearing about Comcast’s network management practices.

C’mon. Please. Does anyone really believe anymore that the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association, League of Rural Voters, and National Council of Women’s Organizations just happen to have the same viewpoints on net neutrality and cable network management? Or maybe, they are all BFF and on Facebook together, and said “hey, we really need to work together to ensure our voices are heard.”

Right.

Or maybe, they are all organizations that get substantial contributions from large telecommunication companies or cable providers, whose legislative agendas just happen to mesh with those of the civil rights groups. (Or maybe they all just use the same policy PR firm, whose prinicpals have been at this a long time.)

C’mon, InfoWorld. C’mon, Mike. Do some digging before you post — the scoop on these outfits is already out there thanks to the fine work of Bruce Kushnick and many others.

While the Bell companies have been somewhat legendary in their Astroturf funding, a little digging shows that some of these new groups are doing a lot of letter-writing on behalf of cable companies. The National Congress of Black Women, for example, is no friend of AT&T’s — but they seem to be well versed in the arcane subject of video franchising laws and now, apparently, in network management as well.

The point here is not to say that telcos and cable companies don’t have an argument; I think there should be some meaningful debate between the actual parties involved (perhaps at a national broadband summit?), where needs of both sides can be discussed and perhaps some common ground found. And this is not meant to belittle the national groups, some of which no doubt perform important work to ensure that civil rights are continually advanced and upheld. But it’s lame to argue, as the “coalition” does, that:

Network management promotes free speech by ensuring that all online content and applications flow freely over the Internet and are not thwarted by a few heavy users of peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file-sharing services.

As the kids say nowadays, that is fail.

Remember, Astroturf only works if you let it work.

David Clark: A Net Neutrality Voice of Reason

I didn’t get to listen to all of the FCC’s Broadband Network Management Practices forum from Harvard today, but I did get to hear one excellent presentation from Internet legend David Clark, a technologist who offered some great insights on network management and bandwidth pricing — while also wondering out loud if the whole network neutrality discussion couldn’t be conducted with just a tad more civility.

“I would plead with all the actors [in the debate] that when they look over the fence, don’t say ‘enemy’ but say ‘partner,’ ” said Clark at the opening of his remarks, reasoning that if access providers and content creators work better together, there might be hope for a better Internet for all in the future. Not a bad sentiment to embrace as the new season of network neutrality debates kicks off.

Olbermann on FISA Fiasco

Who says telecom issues aren’t mainstream? Check out what MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has to say about President Bush’s obfuscation of facts in the FISA fiasco.

David Isenberg, whose blog has been All FISA All The Time lately, boiled it down to a simple statement, one that’s hard to disagree with.

If there is a valid reason for the telcos’ behavior, let it be judged in a court of law — and not by an executive branch which receives political contributions from the same companies.

Silicon Flatirons: The Gossip Post

Now that our serious work is out of the way, here’s a quick take on the non-attributed, behind-the-scenes, from-the-hallways-or-maybe-even-the-restrooms stuff we heard at the Silicon Flatirons conference in Boulder last weekend:

Where’s AT&T? Too busy filtering traffic? Too bad reps from Ma Bell weren’t on hand in Boulder, since the company’s pledge to sift through all its traffic for possible copyright violations seemed to be part of every panel discussion, whether it was part of the topic or not. Since this was a conference mainly of lawyers, the main question seemed to be whether or not AT&T was setting itself up for legal liabilities by pledging to do deep-packet inspection on all bits running across its network. (At one point we were worried that Tim Wu was going to charge the stage in his no-need-for-a-microphone back-and-forth exchange with panelist Mark Lemley. But things calmed down.)

In the end, there seemed to be no good answer (though Level 3 CEO Jim Crowe told his lunch table that his company was legally afraid to do such inspections), especially since nobody from AT&T was around. “It doesn’t really matter if they would be guilty or not,” noted one men’s room pontificator. “No court would convict them of it anyway.” Nothing like a good cynical note to close it.

(At any rate, AT&T did sponsor the Sunday-night beer-n-wine reception, where on their dime we had a tasty 90 Shilling. Thanks!)

Broadband Policy: Boring, but Important

BOULDER, Colo. — Here at the Silicon Flatirons telecom policy conference, you don’t need to convince anyone about the importance of broadband policy and all its related aftereffects. The real challenge, of course, is making broadband issues matter to the outside world, especially when a pending change in the White House presents an opportunity to bring real leadership and vision to the country’s information policy direction.

From both sides of the political aisle, and from all different competitive parts of the industry, there was violent agreement here during Sunday’s sessions about the need to elevate the image of broadband policy in the ongoing political process. While other hot-button issues like the war in Iraq, health care and education rightly are political priorities, the ability for broadband to enable and improve all the other directives means it’s time to stop ignoring the need for leadership and vision in information technology — even if the topic is as boring as hell.