I spent the day taking pictures and wandering in and out of the FCC’s hearing on Comcast filtering BitTorrent, hosted by Berkman in Ames Courtroom at HLS. It was a heady day, full of debate and argument, and a pleasantly surprising amount of openness from the commissioners. They asked pointed questions of the panelists and gave time for responses, even asked follow-up questions.
With respect to my work with ONI, I was asked the question by a commissioner’s staffer of whether we look to FCC guidelines when we are assessing other governments’ filtering policies around the world. And honestly, I hadn’t thought of it that way before. We so often just look at the rest of the world and try to deduce a government’s actions, without looking at our own government as an example, or a starting point for an argument.
The candidness and deep sense of commitment I discerned from the commissioners and those who work on these issues every day might make me change my mind.
Tim Wu brought up the question of foreign policy at the hearing, that the decisions made about broadband traffic preference here at home could be used as an example overseas, and possibly misused. He cautioned the FCC to consider this when creating policy. So if we are to create policy that is not just exportable, but desirable as an example, what would it be?
Then came up the argument of abundance, that in this case traditional market regimes that are based upon scarcity are not necessary. The argument goes that telecoms (and other Internet services) create false scarcity in order to build value for their services, when in fact they could build a business model around abundance, which would serve the public better. If we simply had enough bandwidth, we would not be arguing about Comcast filtering BitTorrent traffic because they say torrents slow the network down.
Now comes the open question. If we are to create desirable exportable policy and consider a model of abundance, that better serves us here at home, what do we say to countries dealing with bandwidth issues across the board, where it is not an issue of false scarcity but true scarcity? Must they have a different policy? Is there ever a case in which we might adopt a sub-utopian policy at home in order to benefit those overseas?
