I almost feel sorry for Comcast. Almost.
It’s not fashionable to feel sorry for a big nationwide cable provider. Witness this popular Web site. A few months ago, Comcast was accused of violating the “net neutrality” doctrine when users discovered Comcast’s high-speed Internet service was slowing or blocking high-bandwidth traffic from file-sharing provider BitTorrent. The company has since said it won’t do that anymore.
But the FCC still has concerns about what Comcast was doing and whether other Internet service providers are picking and choosing what traffic to slow. So the commission decided to hold hearings on the topic.
In what turned out to be one of the worst public image moves ever, Comcast hired people to fill seats at the standing-room-only hearing. That made the company look like it was trying to kill any debate over its practices. Comcast got a slew of bad publicity.
Which it deserved for that bone-headed move. So today was the second FCC hearing on the subject, this time at Stanford University in California. And Comcast just decided to skip the whole thing. To be fair, the other big cable Internet providers also skipped. But Comcast’s absence was noticed the most. Bloggers and others are predictably piqued.
So let me be a contrarian, kind of like this guy. After the PR disaster this whole thing has been for Comcast and with the FCC looking like it’s divided anyway over whether new rules are needed, the company probably didn’t have much to gain by showing up today.
The bigger issue of net neutrality has been popping up regularly in recent years, especially as the sharing of music, video and other large files over the Internet has led to more network congestion.
The FCC commissioners seem split over whether new rules are needed, but they apparently heard loud and clear today from the defenders of net neutrality.
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