Here’s your announcement on the FCC hearing in Boston this Monday.
11:00 a.m. Welcome/Opening Remarks
11:45 a.m. Technology Demonstration – Gilles BianRosa, Chief Executive Officer, Vuze, Inc.
12:00 p.m. Panel Discussion 1: Policy Perspectives
* Marvin Ammori, General Counsel, Free Press
* Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School
* The Honorable Daniel E. Bosley, State Representative, Massachusetts
* David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation
* The Honorable Tom Tauke, Executive Vice President – Public Affairs, Policy and Communications, Verizon Communications
* Timothy Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
* Christopher S. Yoo, Professor of Law and Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, University of Pennsylvania Law School
1:30 Lunch break
2:15 Panel Discussion 2: Technological Perspectives
* Daniel Weitzner, Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group
* Richard Bennett, Network Architect
* David Clark, Senior Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
* Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer, BitTorrent
* David P. Reed, Adjunct Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab
* Scott Smyers, Senior Vice President, Network & Systems Architecture Division, Sony Electronics Inc.
3:45 p.m. Closing Remarks
4:00 p.m. Adjournment
It is amazing that this “kangaroo court” is being held at a law school, because they have clearly stacked the deck. One side — Vuze and Free Press — gets to do a “technology demonstration” (in other words, a biased sales pitch) and gets twice as many voices on every panel. The other side — the ISPs who are being exploited by Vuze — gets much less time to speak its piece and no demo time. Who set up this one-sided forum?
Well it is being held in the Moot Courtroom, so maybe that means something. I expect that Weitzner, Reed, and Klinker will be hard on Comcast, but Clark and Smyers will take the other side. Clark’s an interesting guy because he’s done real work on QoS for ten years or more. Smyers will probably emphasize the role of management in rooting out pirates, Weitzner will be clueless and Reed will be totally bonkers. I believe the chairman has a fairly open mind but the others have already taken their sides.
By the way, what do you think of the claims that Comcast packed the hall? Did you get the impression that this really happened? They might well have been justified, since the FCC and Vuze packed the agenda, but to many folks out there it still comes across as a shady tactic.
I was really surprised at how loud the applause was when Cohen finished speaking, so they clearly did pack the hall. But the hall was first-come, first-served and open to all with no management or quotas, so what do you expect?
It was a pretty funny way to make a point, actually.