The Federal Communications Commission continued its Net-neutrality road show Thursday with a seven-hour hearing at Stanford Law School in the heart of Silicon Valley. The FCC held a similar hearing at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., in February, in which cable giant Comcast was castigated for its network-management activities.

The FCC’s attention to these matters was spurred by an Associated Press report that Comcast was engaged in throttling the uploading of media files by the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. In Cambridge, Comcast strenuously denied it was doing anything wrong, citing the need to manage its network. The concept that ISPs are needed to let a few P2P users degrade quality for the huge majority of other users is untenable, the company argued.

Comcast declined to seem at Thursday’s hearing. A Comcast spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the company “felt the issues specific to us were well covered at the first hearing, and the focus of that

event should be broader than any individual company’s issues.”

BitTorrent Cooperation

In the weeks following the Cambridge hearing, Comcast made an abrupt turnaround. Two weeks ago, it announced an agreement with BitTorrent, in which Comcast agreed to stop blocking BitTorrent and adopt a “protocol-agnostic” network-management scheme. For its part, BitTorrent said it would work with Comcast to manufacture its application more network-friendly.

Before the advent of peer-to-peer applications, most Web usage was downstream. Users sent short HTTP requests upstream, and Web sites sent larger text and graphic files down. But with P2P applications like BitTorrent, PCs around the world become servers themselves — and when a lot of Net users are serving up files, shared networks can become clogged.

Comcast is currently dealing with the situation by interrupting some of those uploads. Under the new approach, Comcast will throttle back traffic only at peak overload times, and…

Orginal post by Top Tech News