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Filtering to star in Harvard Yard - February 12, 2008

The public-policy battle over Internet filtering and other forms of "bandwidth management" is heating up. Late on Tuesday, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) was expected to introduce the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, the first major legislative response to recent revelations that Comcast and other major ISPs were blocking or inhibiting certain kinds of traffic on their networks. The bill is co-sponsored by Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS), giving it immediate bipartisan oomph. The Open Internet Coalition, made up of several consumer advocacy groups and technology companies, worked closely on the bill with Markey's office.

"The bipartisan Internet Freedom Preservation Act... is an important step in ensuring the Internet remains open for consumers and innovators," OIC executive director Markham Erickson said in a statement Tuesday. "This bill, expected to be introduced today, will make Net Neutrality the law of the land, and will require the FCC to protect Internet freedom from the predatory efforts of the telco and cable gatekeepers."

Meanwhile, the FCC announced Tuesday that it will hold an en banc (full commission) hearing on "broadband network management practices," on Tuesday, Feb. 26 at Harvard Law School. The commission has been considering a trio of petitions from various members of OIC, as well as online video platform provider Vuze, to investigate Comcast's alleged practice of throttling BitTorrent traffic. The public comment period for that proceeding ends this week, and has so far brought in over 20,000 submissions.

UPDATE: The full text of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act is available here.
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