Photo by chrislb Chinese internet café in Lijiang. image:37361:0::0

Leading digital rights guru, Professor Lawrence Lessig has called for tighter regulations on the way we use the Internet, at a public meeting this week. One of the main topics the Professor brought up at the meeting was to look at the way many major Internet companies work on dealing with site traffic at peak times.

The meeting had been initially called for with some urgency after it was announced that US giants, Comcast were so called "managing their traffic" by actually stopping the majority of their 13 million customers from uploading files to networks such as BitTorrent and similar "peer-to-peer networks." In response to the news, the FCC have launched an immediate investigation into the company and has stated that it will result in a hefty fine for Comcast.

As a panic technique, Comcast have quickly responded to the inquiry and have said they are looking to change their policy immediately to stop any unwanted bad publicity

The Professor has pointed the finger at the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) in the grueling seven hour meeting at Stanford University, calling for the management firm to keep at closer eye on the flow of traffic especially to the most popular sites on the web, moving users along at a steady rate, rather like a traffic calming system we are used on the roads. Others speaking at the meeting were a long line of Internet users and figure heads including network administrators, engineers behind the scenes of what makes the web work, and even songwriters, who in effect, are one of the groups across the globe who use the Internet regularly to promote and record their music.

Idealistically, the Professor claimed that the web should have a process were users could access the most popular sites without waiting valuable time waiting for pages to open or information to download. He stated that the web should have system that enables users to "flow equally across" the web making all areas accessible for all in reasonable time.

He called this the "principle of net neutrality", and claimed that at the present time, network firms were abusing this due to the way they limit use for their domestic broadband customers. In the UK, the broadband system works along the same principle but companies have found that they can flow the traffic through sites at peak times ensuring that all broadband customers get the fastest speed possible at these times.

Yet in the US, the Professor said that the rules had to be clear cut so that every fell in line and understood the urgency of flowing traffic and being fair to all customers. For firms and customers alike there had to be an element of the 'carrot principle' - financial incentives for companies so they are more likely to abide by the rules. In the meantime, net firms are more likely to squeeze as much traffic through so that they can collect the profits which at the moment, come in toe with this act.

At the meeting, it had been a case of two heads of both parties attempting to see eye to eye. The two Democrats stated that there had to be rules set up soon to stop net firms engaging in a lottery based upon the principles of "the more users in, the more money to be made," at the same time, the two Republican commissioners who also sit on the board of the FCC said that they felt to "over-burden" net companies, would only confuse firms thus allowing them more scope to back out of obeying the new laws.

Chairman, Kevin Martin, for the FCC said that either way, rules had to be stringent and enforced so that firms could not have the run of the web and not play fair by their customers. They could do as they wished, so long as they kept their customers informed at all times as to their nature of the way they wanted the company to run. He said,

"There must be adequate disclosures of the particular traffic management tools. Consumers must be fully informed of the exact nature of the service they are purchasing."