Stanford professor Larry Lessig brought down the house at a net neutrality hearing Thursday, calling for the Federal Communications Commission to finally move to make sure that the internet's architecture remain open and neutral, with the goal of having the internet become as uncomplicated as the electrical grid.

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.

"We are facing these problems because of a failure of FCC policy," Lessig said, as the FCC's five commissioners sat behind him in a Stanford auditorium. "The FCC failed to make it clear to the network owners that if they are building the internet they need to build it neutrally."

"The burden should be on those who would change its architecture," Lessig continued.

Lessig hypothesized an electricity grid that would query whether a device plugged in was made by Sony or Toshiba, or was approved, saying that such a network could be built, but one would need very strong arguments to convince the world to change. That should be the same with the internet, he argued.

Lessig derided carriers' arguments that they need new business models in order to justify the costs of laying out new networks, referring to "coin-operated experts that populate Washington these days."

"We should have a Missouri attitude, a show-me attitude, that competition will continue," Lessig said.

Lessig's message was oddly echoed by the Christian Coalition of America's Michele Combs, who correctly pointed out that Comcast's ongoing interruption of BitTorrent programs uses one of the same techniques the Chinese government uses to censor the internet in China — fake reset packets.

"We have seen network operators block political speech and block the most popular application on the internet – Comcast blocked people downloading the King James bible," Combs said, referring presumably in the first case to Verizon blocking pro-choice SMS messages and in the second case to an AP story that tested out whether Comcast was interfering with BitTorrent by attempting to download a public-domain translation of the Bible.

FCC Chairman Martin noted at the opening of the scheduled seven-hour public hearing that Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner were all invited to speak, but declined to participate.

Their sole defender on the first panel was George Ou, a former network engineer and until recently, a ZDNet writer.

Ou cited traffic figures from Japan that showed that a small minority of users in Japan sucked up nearly half of the available bandwidth and argued that network traffic management has long been integral to intranets and the internet.

FCC commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate warned against federal rules that would limit ISPs' efforts to identify downloaded child pornography.

"Child pornography is a multi-billion dollar segment of our economy," Tate said, without referencing her source for the statistic. "I want to make sure that as we discuss these issues we don't end up with unintended consequences of regulatory actions."

She noted that ISPs spent $15 billion in 2007 adding capacity.

"We must remain vigilant against intrusive government action that could disrupt the process of this broadband deployment," Tate said, though the crowd rewarded her remarks with boos when she finished.

The entertainment industry weighed in as well, with a representative of the Songwriter's Guild calling for technology to prevent unauthorized music sharing on the internet. Jean Prewitt, the president of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, called for non-discrimination policies as a way to let artists not aligned with major studios to find an audience and innovate.

"We need to take proactive measures so that internet does not become the closed bastion that television has become," Prewitt said to cheers.

But perhaps the hero of the day for the audience was software engineer Robb Topolski, who first posted forensic proof of Comcast's use of fake packets to throttle BitTorrent usage.

Topolski said he was trying to use file sharing software to distribute old recordings of barbershop quartet music he's gotten off of old wax cylinders – material that would clearly no longer be copyrighted.

He reported his findings to the popular DSLreports.com site, and then it quickly became news in the blogs and mainstream press sites. He also disputes Comcast's defense that it only messes with BitTorrent when the network is congested, saying he recently suffered from insomnia and noticed that Comcast was blocking P2P protocols at 1:45 a.m. in the morning.

"I see this pretty simply as an example of jamming of authorized communications," Topolski said, comparing the FCC's failure to force Comcast to stop the practice to the speed with which it moves when a ham radio operator reports radio interference.

"The situation continues today," Topolski said. "It is happening right now."

The hearing is continuing, and is likely to get heated when members of the public take to the microphone later this afternoon.

See Also: