Action urged to keep net neutral

Tough action is required by US regulators to protect the principles that have made the net so successful, a leading digital rights lawyer has said.

Professor Lawrence Lessig was speaking at a public meeting to debate the tactics some net firms use to manage data traffic at busy times.

He said the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) should act to keep all net traffic flowing equally.

The FCC said net firms had a duty to tell customers about data management.

Read more here and here.

Now just two days before the FCC's Stanford hearing, Comcast issued yet another press release, probably aimed at dissuading the FCC from taking any action against it. Comcast and another peer-to-peer company, Pando Networks, said they created their own "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for file sharing, much to the amusement of some legal experts..

After speaking with Comcast, it appears that their "Bill of Rights," is really about informing the consumer that their Internet traffic could suffer delays. The cable company also says it could "de-prioritize" very heavy users of Internet bandwidth, and it will work with Pando Networks to learn how to work with peer-to-peer traffic.

Clearly, Comcast is trying to have it both ways, playing the role of the cable monolith and at the same time, trying to present a nicer face to the peer-to-peer community and consumers.