Kevin Martin is planning to sanction Comcast for traffic shaping.  Although good, this isn’t a victory by any means as Martin, anointed by the great W., blames telecoms needs for traffic shaping on their inability to expand due to over-regulation.  He believes, as any “small” government lovin’ Republican should, that telecoms should be free to charge users whatever they want in exchange for letting these users do whatever they want, the usual “freedom isn’t free”.  Martin does seem to be moderate compared to some his compatriots, he is also pushing cable companies to allow users to pick the channels they want to subscribe to instead of being forced to subscribe to over-priced packages. link

I wonder if anything will happen to Bell here in Canada, who blatant traffic-shapers…

At the previous hearing at Harvard Law School, Comcast attracted criticism for filling the auditorium with paid attendees. This time around, the telcos declined to participate at all. They sent proxies in their place: a conservative think tank called the Phoenix Center, freelance tech pundit George Ou, and one ISP: Lariat.net of Wyoming. It’s a pity that ISPs aren’t willing to participate in public debate about their own practices.

They could’ve at least pretended that these hearings meant anything….

link 

On Friday FCC Chairman Kevin Martin indicated during a speech at Stanford University’s Law School that the commission may take action against the cable operator, which has been accused of blocking or slowing down the peer-to-peer file sharing service BitTorrent on its broadband network.”

Jeff Jarvis, author of the blog BuzzMachine, has a different take on the Kevin Martin’s plan to relax media ownership laws. Unlike Robert McChesney (see previous post) he thinks the FCC allowing cross-platform media ownership is a good thing and should in fact go further. He writes: “Why not give them a chance to invent new ways to gather and serve journalism across all media and all distribution channels?”