Barack Obama would make actions such as cable company Comcast's interference with certain kinds of Internet traffic illegal under his administration, an aide said on Thursday.

The aide spoke on background as part of a morning conference call with bloggers and writers to further explain the details of the Democratic presidential candidate's recently unveiled technology policy.

Asked whether Obama would make behavior such as Comcast's blocking of the BitTorrent protocol illegal, the aide said that he would.

The aide said what Comcast is doing to BitTorrent amounts to discrimination against a Web site. On that basis, that action would violate the rules that would be in place under Barack Obama's administration, he said.

When asked to clarify – whether traffic management would then be illegal, the aide said that that is a different question, but that that would be something administration officials would have to "look at."

Obama's policy document, released Wednesday to coincide with his visit to Google in Mountain View, Ca. states the following:

Barack Obama supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. This principle will ensure that the new competitors, especially small or non-profit speakers, have the same opportunity as incumbents to innovate on the Internet and to reach large audiences.

"What

I find compelling about the senator's proposal is that it attempts to address the problem in a way that could be effectively enforced," said

Stanford Law School Professor Larry Lessig during the conference call.

Lessig's thrown his support behind Obama after declaring Obama rival Hillary Rodham Clinton's approach to policy making unacceptable.

The professor noted that Obama's adopted former Republican FCC Chairman Michael

Powell's principles for ensuring Net Neutrality, but has added a twist.

"Senator Obama has added a requirement that any charges not be discrimminatory," he said. "You can't say: Google, were going to charge you this, Yahoo, we're going to charge you that. Rather than regulations that require the regulators to "look under the hood, this is a regulation that looks to the contracts that parties have entered into, thereby ... allowing the FCC to do its job to ensure a neutral and open Internet."

The Associated Press recently conducted tests to verify several of Comcast customers' claims that the cable and high speed Internet service provider is discriminating against

BitTorrent Internet traffic.

The AP found that it did, as did tests performed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Comcast, for its part,deniesthat it is discriminating. Instead, its spokespeople have said that the company is managing its traffic to ensure the optimal experience for its users. Nevertheless, the news has sparked off a lawsuit in California, as well as a call on Wednesday for a rulemaking at the FCC from Silicon Valley start-up Vuze, which uses BitTorrent to distribute high definition television programming on the Web. Vuze wants the FCC to establish some new rules concerning the way telecom companies manage their networks.

Obama's staff spoke on background, but others who spoke on the record during the call were Lessig, Beth Noveck of New York Law School and Julius Genachowski, co-founder and managing director of Rock Creek

Ventures and former chief counsel to Federal Communications Commission

Chairman Reed Hundt.

Obama's policy staff also emphasized that their candidate's tech policy

platform is a integral theme that dovetails with the "central thrust"

of his candidacy, which is to turn the current model of governing on its head by putting some of the decision-making processes of governing back into the hands of citizens.

An integral part of that process is making as much government data available in machine-readable formats to people as possible. Though it sounds prosaic, the overarching goal is to create a kind of "open source" government, of which the work of the Sunlight Foundation is an example.

One example of how this might work is a pilot project spearheaded by NYLS'

Noveck, who helped to create the US Patent and Trademark Office' Peer to Patent Project. The project solicits contributions from the wider community for information relevant to a select group of patent applications. The goal is to leverage the knowledge of experts in the wider community to prevent patent office examiners from granting monopolies on ideas that are already obvious.

"We can't rely on the government for all of the expertise and solutions," Noveck said. "What's also really exciting about [Obama's] plan is that it articulates a tremendous level of respect for the American people by asking them to help government make better decisions."

The obvious subtext of the conference call: Obama's technology platform is an enabling mechanism for his call for an open and transparent government "for the people" while rival Clinton's camp offers a policy framework that is more of the same.

Clinton is currently under attackby her rivals and Republicans for the secrecy surrounding the records from her husband's administration. They are under wraps at the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock,

Arkansas.

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