Group Wants ISPs to Come Clean on Traffic

Ars Technica reports: After securing a victory in the Comcast P2P throttling case, advocacy group Free Press is back on offense against the ISPs. The request (PDF) this time is for more FCC action; if granted, Internet providers would need to offer up detailed information on "any practice that monitors or interferes with their customers' Internet use." In addition, ISPs would have to offer minimum speed guarantees for their broadband offerings, not just potential maximum speeds.

At the moment, broadband customers are the victim of "information asymmetries" -- ISPs know plenty about their own network management practices, but consumers know less and can find out little. Without that information, all 6Mbps broadband offerings might look identical, for instance, whereas disclosure might reveal that one company offers average speeds of only 4Mbps and blocks P2P uploads.

The Free Press request cites the expected cases of Comcast and NebuAd, both of which engaged in behavior that could be quite difficult for end users to spot. After the FCC issued its Comcast smackdown, the company complied with a request for detailed information about its network management practices past and future, and it did so without needing to file confidential information with the agency.

If Comcast can do it when asked, why can't everyone else? "Comcast has demonstrated that providers can disclose clear, basic, yet valuable information on infrastructure and on methods and thresholds for network controls," says the filing. And Free Press sees no reason why the disclosure requirement should vary by technology, which means that wireless operators would need to disclose their own management schemes.

More controversially, the group wants ISPs to report "certain infrastructure information" so that users can decide whether "congestion is the result of massive overloading of the network by the provider to avoid the expense of infrastructure investment." In addition, it likes AT&T's practice of disclosing minimum service levels, below which the company will never throttle its users' connections. Free Press suggests that the practice should be a "minimum floor for industry-wide, ongoing disclosure of network interference and infrastructure information."

(In what might be a first, Free Press appears to praise some of AT&T's and Comcast's behavior. A quick check from the windows of the Orbiting HQ reveals that, in fact, the Earth is still spinning on its merry way around the sun.)

Ben Scott, Free Press policy director, complains that "terms of service agreements contain the vaguest language that corporate lawyers can devise -- further stacking the deck against the consumer. Moving forward, we propose that any service provider that wants to manipulate the connection between Internet users and Internet content has an obligation to disclose what it is doing."

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