Comcast Blocks Public From FCC Hearing

What were the folks at Comcast thinking when they attempted to thwart customers who were fed up with their monopolistic tactics? If you don’t know, Comcast got caught by and admitted to paying employees and people off the streets to sit in on a hearing that was called to deal with the issue of Comcast blocking Internet access for some of its heavy users. Here’s how things panned out…

By Martin H. Bosworth

ConsumerAffairs.Com

February 26, 2008

An already contentious skirmish between the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Comcast over the cable company's blocking Internet access for some of its subscribers got hotter when Comcast blocked access to an FCC hearing.

The cable company admitted to paying employees and members of the general public to fill up seats in an FCC hearing in Cambridge, Massachusetts Monday.

Playing off a common Washington, D.C. tradition of lobbyists paying "placeholders" -- often poor people and supposedly starving students -- to hold spots in line for crowded Capitol Hill events, Comcast's spokespersons admitted it paid people to do the same for a hearing on the company's actions regarding its interference with peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as BitTorrent.

The placeholders not only held spots in line, but also crowded into the hearing itself, preventing more than 100 attendees -- many of whom had come to speak against Comcast -- from getting inside.

Tim Karr, campaign director of net neutrality advocacy group SaveTheInternet.com, said that "First, Comcast was caught blocking the Internet. Now it has been caught blocking the public from the debate. The only people cheering Comcast are those paid to do so."

"Clearly, Comcast will resort to just about any underhanded tactic to stack the decks in its favor," Karr said, "and yet Comcast still expects us to trust them with the future of the Internet?"

SaveTheInternet.com published an audio file on their blog of what they claimed was an interview with a man who had been paid to show up for the hearing, even though he had no idea what it was for.

The FCC convened the hearing after promising to investigate Comcast for violating the principles of net neutrality, the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. FCC chairman Kevin Martin said that while Comcast has the right to engage in "reasonable steps to manage traffic, but they cannot arbitrarily block access."

"I keep saying that the time has come for a specific enforceable principle of nondiscrimination," said fellow commissioner Michael Copps. "This principle should allow for reasonable network management, but make crystal clear that broadband network operators cannot shackle the promise of the Internet."

"Don't let the rhetoric of some of our critics scare you," said David Cohen, executive vice president of Verizon, speaking on behalf of network providers, "Every broadband network is managed. Our customers want to fight spam or viruses, and they want us to manage network congestion so they can do what they want, when they want at acceptable speeds."

Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Ed Markey spoke in favor of net neutrality as a right of free speech.

"Let me underscore that the Internet is as much mine and yours as it is Verizon's, AT&T's or Comcast's," he said.

Markey, who tried unsuccessfully to pass several pieces of legislation in the previous Congress that would have enshrined the principles of a neutral Internet into law, introduced new legislation earlier this month that would task the FCC to investigate Internet service providers in order to ensure they were not blocking or discriminating against certain types of content.

So where is all of this going and what does it mean to you? Stay tuned; we’ll answer those questions and more.