Veritas on Net Neutrality

Harvard Law School held a field hearing on net neutrality on February 25, 2008.

Net Neutrality is defined in Wikipedia by Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu: "Network neutrality is best defined as a network design principle. The idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally."

The focus of the hearing was on cable operator Comcast’s Internet filtering activities. Comcast had stalled uploads from peer-to-peer file sharing applications such as BitTorrent.

Comcast admitted to causing delays for BitTorrent across its networks. Comcast uses packet shaping, which is a way to manage traffic across its network. Comcast says that BitTorrent causes congestion on their network, and that is the reason they are filtering the traffic.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-for profit company that guards digital rights, said that Comcast behavior is discriminatory because the technique only focuses on file-sharing applications.

"Consumers need to know if and how network management practices distinguish between different applications, so that consumers can configure their own applications and systems properly," Martin said in his opening statement.

“The Internet is as much mine and yours as it is Comcast’s,” said Representative Edward Markey at the hearing, who introduced a bill on net neutrality. Comcast is part of at least two consumer lawsuits over its filtering activities.

David Cohen, a Comcast vice president who spoke during the hearing, re-iterated that the company does not block traffic, but merely manages it.

"All of this is designed to have a minimal amount of impact on our users," he said. "To be absolutely clear, we do not block any websites or any protocols, including P2P.