I was able to listen to a pretty good portion of the testimony at yesterday’s FCC hearing on broadband network management at Stanford University. My overall impression is that the public interest in a free, open internet got a pretty fair hearing, overall, with even some of the more “free market” economists having to admit market failure and problems with Comcast’s blocking BitTorrent, even if they still don’t like net neutrality (or at least not the term “network neutrality).
Two interesting moments for me were when Michele Combs from the Christian Coalition testified that Comcast was blocking torrents distributing the King James bible, and hearing from Robb Topolski, the software quality engineer who first identified and rooted out Comcast’s blocking technique. Highlights from some of the expert testimony air on today’s radioshow, already online, including an excerpt from Topolski.
As I mentioned yesterday, there were several people using Twitter from the audience in Stanford, posting quick updates on the action. I found this play-by-play really valuable, since I didn’t have the luxury to pay constant attention to the hearing webcast.
One of the persons twittering from the hearing, simX, posted a compilation of tweets, along with a great summary of the hearing.
SavetheInternet.com has a short summary with links to some of the written testimony.
The FCC has archived the audio from the hearing, along with captions [Real Audio].
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