Political Bloviation

More important than the wild claim that eliminating piracy would somehow put money into farmer’s packets are the unintended consequences of putting the FCC in charge of policing the internet:

NBC: Peer-to-peer costs corn farmers money
But the bigger issue here is that NBC wants the FCC to require ISPs to filter content. How this would work, exactly, is not explained, and as the public interest groups point out in their filing, “nearly any Internet protocol can be used to illegally transfer copyrighted materials—instant messaging, the Web, e-mail, and many other protocols are capable of being used for this purpose.” The groups also argue that such filters (assuming that they work well, and this is a major assumption) would hinder fair use and would basically put the FCC in charge of setting Internet technology policy. After the agency was smacked down by the courts for exceeding its authority when it came to the broadcast flag, FCC officials are probably not in the mood to tackle such a controversial new policy.

One of the most important points made in the reply concerns NBC’s charge that network neutrality (which this is all about) would prevent most “network management” tools from being used. Packet shaping, prioritization, deep packet inspection, bandwidth throttling—NBC argues that all of these tools would become illegal. This is a crucial question, since many of these management tools serve a useful purpose; does anyone not want VoIP traffic to be moved through network with less latency than, say, a P2P download?

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