• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 25, 2008

Congressman Ed Markey (D-Ma.) today urged the Federal Communications Commission to be very wary of companies' statements that they slow traffic to peer-to-peer sites in order to manage traffic on their network.

"We want to look back years from now and look back and be able to celebrate that this is no country for old bandwidths," he said, adding that the FCC shouldn't stand by while there's a "transformation of Bit Torrent into Bit Trickle."

Markey, the FCC and a host of a host of law professors and others came to Cambridge today for a public hearing about net neutrality. The conference today was spurred by the revelation that Comcast is slowing traffic to bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer sites. The company says it's only doing so to manage traffic across its network, but net neutrality advocates -- including Markey -- say these explanations are inadequate.

Markey, who recently introduced legislation endorsing net neutrality in principle, argued that if a lack of bandwidth is responsible for the decision to impede traffic, the government should then re-examine broadband policies "with the goal of jump-starting competition."

FCC Chair Kevin Martin added that companies that say they're interfering with traffic as part of a network management plan need to tell consumers. "It seems important that, for any of these practices to be reasonable, they be conducted in an open and transparent way."