Robert Topolski simply wanted to share digital recordings of barber shop quartets with his buddies, says the NY Times.
On Thursday, the Oregon-based software quality engineer who was the first to raise alarms about Comcast’s practice of blocking peer-to-peer file sharing data on the company’s network, testified at an FCC hearing at Stanford University (video highlights) and stated that his network access was still being restricted.
The complaint that Mr. Topolski posted on the Internet ultimately led to two public hearings held by the agency focusing on the issue of network neutrality.
The first was held in February at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. The second focused on engineering management of the Internet and new and innovative digital applications.
At Stanford a parade of witnesses challenged the efforts of the giant Internet service providers to control and, in some cases, block the data traffic that flows over their networks.
The panel was enlivened by an activist group called the “Raging Grannies,” who stood outside before the hearing began and sang songs condemning Comcast’s pricing and other practices.
“I wanted to use Gnutella,” said Mr. Topolski, referring to a distributed software application that is used to share files via the Internet. “I found that I couldn’t.”
Other panelists who testified on Thursday said that the giant cable company’s tactics were akin to those used by computer outlaws and hackers.
Although they were invited to appear before the Commission, all of the major Internet service providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, declined to appear.
About 300 people attended to the hearing, which began with testimony from Larry Lessig, a Stanford Law School professor and founder of the Center for Internet and Society.
“We are here facing these problems because of a failure of F.C.C. policy,” Mr. Lessig said. “The F.C.C. has failed to make it absolutely clear that network owners, if they’re building the Internet, have to make it absolutely open.”
According to C/Net, network engineer and consultant, George Ou was the lone networking expert in support of Comcast and other ISPs having the ability to throttle traffic. He said that ISPs should have the right to ratchet back the demands of the Internet’s thirstiest customers, peer-to-peer networks.
“Video is causing a new collapse (of the Internet). It requires 100- to 1000-fold increase in capacity to deal with current crisis.”
Others at the hearing said that the real problem of network congestion, and the heart of the Comcast-BitTorrent issue, is piracy. A representative of the Songwriters Guild of America said that ISPs should be able to manage traffic on their networks and filter the transfer of pirated content.
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