The House Judiciary Committee chairman, John Conyers, says that reports to the effect that Comcast secretly slowed – and in some cases killed – BitTorrent traffic demonstrate “the open architecture of the Internet is under siege. The problem is that many of the innovations we've enjoyed on the Internet would have never occurred under this proposed regime.”
Conyers spoke at the latest in a series of federal hearings on ‘Net neutrality proposals - fiercely criticised by incumbent network owners and some copyright owners but championed by just about everyone else.
He said, “I am concerned that if Congress stands by and does nothing, we will soon find ourselves living in a world where those who pay, can play, but those who don't are simply out of luck. Mr. Conyers added that he is considering introducing legislation that would make filtering certain types of content a federal crime.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has held similar hearings and many speculate that its chairman, Kevin Martin, hopes to enact conservative regulation before Congress has the opportunity to pass a more restrictive law.
Conyers says traffic shaping is an antitrust issue as carriers now find themselves in the position of offering video services even while transporting rivals' content. From this perspective Comcast benefits from blocking P2P traffic as it eliminates a free challenge to its pay television offerings.
The operator itself denies it has singled-out any type of traffic based on content and insists traffic shaping is necessary to ensure the best consumer experience possible.
However, theis claim was called into question late last week by Alcatel-Lucent. The company said its new 9900 Wireless Network Guardian indicated enterprise applications such as IP-VPN and mobile email were far larger drains on network resources than direct P2P downloads.