1. Lessig mislead the public about “Verizon blocked text messages”. Verizon NEVER blocked a single text message. Lessig supports the worst form of Broadband for consumers which is Volume Caps, a form of Metered Internet. He won’t use the world “Volume Cap” or “Metered Internet”, but you check his blog (http://lessig.org/blog/2008/04/testifying_fcc_stanford.html) and he reiterated that he supports “Bandwidth Commitments at different prices”.

2. Jon Peha incorrectly compared P2P to a phone call. After conversing with Peha along with Richard Bennett, Peha showed that he didn’t understand the technical aspects of P2P. P2P will automatically resume where it left off; it doesn’t require the user to redial like a telephone. Furthermore, P2P usually has about 10 to 30 TCP streams running so if you did a TCP reset to 25% of those streams, you’d slow it down by 25% and NOT “block” it like Peha testified. Peha was shocked when I told him that a BitTorrent download typically had 10 to 30 TCP streams running at the same time and it was clear Peha has never studied how P2P works.

3. Topolski was propped up as a hero by Martin in front of a very anti-corporate audience where half of them seemed to have been from “Poor Magazine” and a solid showing from “Raging Grannies” who were told to attack George Ou on sight by SaveTheInternet.com. Topolski is a software QA tester; not a network engineer. He made startling comments and claims that the “Internet started out as a peer-to-peer network” conflating p2p file transfer with a point-to-point experimental network. Topolski made grand claims about Comcast issuing TCP resets at 1:45AM when he hasn’t submitted any forensic evidence, he’s too small of a sampling point, he has no idea whether the TCP reset came from Comcast or not, nor does he have any idea whether Comcast had congestion problems at 1:45AM. Topolski tried to argue with my point that spoofed TCP resets are common saying I was wrong, but Topolski is no expert in networking. Brett Glass (another panelist who runs a wireless ISP) told me after the event he’s been using TCP resets for 15 years to clean up orphaned dial up sessions and network architect Richard Bennett explained that even NAT (Network Address Translation) will issue spoofed TCP resets to clean up orphaned TCP sessions that the end points didn’t bother cleaning up themselves.

The whole hearing was a political circus. You said I didn’t do my past writing justice but it’s kind of hard to do that when the other side gets a 10:1 time-to-speak advantage against you. I got interrupted by Chairman Martin and the Raging Grannies and it ate in to my measly 5 minutes of time to present. As a result I rushed and veered off my script and I got rattled under the pressure and it showed. People who didn’t understand networking like Larry Lessig rambled on for a 26 minute monologue and an 8-minute reply to one of Martin’s questions while I got cut off from giving a more technical rebuttals at times. Brett Glass got cut off in his presentation while Herald Feld (who misrepresented me on VONTV claiming I was against transparency) rambled on for much longer in front of a one-sided anti-corporate audience. So yeah, are you surprised I didn’t do well under the given circumstances?