‘We don’t know and don’t care’ what content moves over the Comcas...

by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin of Comcast network management practices (CD April 23 p1). “I don’t know how much more clear we can be about this,” Waz said. Comcast manages bandwidth-intensive protocols like P2P, not applications, he said. Comcast’s decision to start using technology-agnostic management is not an admission that it has discriminated against content, he said. Waz stressed that the new system will be in place by year end. “If there’s any lack of clarity on that, I'm glad to have the opportunity to restate what we said in our press release.” On the panel, Waz and Verizon’s Link Hoewing said industry cooperation is the way to address network management concerns. A Comcast- and BitTorrent-planned Internet Engineering Task Force workshop, as well as Comcast and other ISPs’ collaboration in the Distributed Computing Industry Association P4P Working Group, prove regulation isn’t needed to thwart network management abuses, Waz said. “We're not going to have problems working through these issues if we can work together,” Hoewing agreed. The technology industry has faced congestion problems before, he said, citing the “World Wide Wait” of the ‘90s and FTP congestion problems before that. Adding capacity is one way to fight network congestion, but not the whole answer, he said. Also on the panel, Hoewing dismissed condemnations of U.S. broadband deployment. The U.S. has a national broadband strategy, he said. “We actually have consciously, over a period of years said, ‘We're going to encourage platform competition,'” he said. That “is a national broadband policy.” There’s still progress to be made, he said, noting rural areas as an example: “But by and large there is a national policy that has been working pretty well.”