Copyright Law

BitTorrent CEO: For Now, Public is the Broadband Regulator

By Jared Moya

BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker says that after an appeals courts ruled the FCC lacked the “ancillary” authority to enforce net neutrality rules it will be the public that serves as regulator in the interim, determining how service and application providers behave.

BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker told an audience at the eComm conference in Burlingame, California recently that the it will be up to ISPs to self-regulate and respond to consumer demands in the wake of Comcast’s successful appeal of FCC sanctions.

Comcast was sanctioned by the FCC which found the ISP violated the agency’s principles for throttling BitTorrent connections.

“We consider whether Comcast, a provider of broadband Internet access over cable lines, may selectively target and interfere with connections of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications under the facts of this case,” said the FCC. “Although Comcast asserts that its conduct is necessary to ease network congestion, we conclude that the company?s discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet and does not constitute reasonable network management.”

Comcast, of course, appealed that decision and won. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled the FCC lacked the “ancillary” authority necessary to enforce net neutrality rules.

Klinker says that in the wake of that decision it will be the public whom serves as regulator of the Internet, passing judgment on how ISPs and application providers behave.

“There is no ambiguity,” he said. “There is not going to be, at least in the near term, a strong regulator for broadband.”

“The public is our regulator.”

He added that he wasn’t concerned with ISPs trying to become gatekeepers of the Internet or with ISPs throttling BitTorrent connections as Comcast did in the past. In his opinion the larger threat is Apple’s “feudal” approach to the Internet, locking in products, applications, and services between a proprietary walled garden.

On that I agree.

All people want are quicker speeds during peak traffic hours, Klinker said, and in that context they’ll find no fault with network management practices that throttle applications and services like BitTorrent.

That may be so, but the real problem is the lack of meaningful ISP competition. If one provider has network management practices that customers don’t like it’s fairly difficult to choose an alternative. The public is only a strong regulator in so much as they are able to “vote with their feet,” and patronize those businesses they like, and not just able to.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).