The FCC has set July 20 as the date for the first meeting of
its Open Internet Advisory Committee (OIAC), which is charged with monitoring
the effects of the FCC's Open Internet rules.
The OIAC will "observe market developments regarding
the freedom and openness of the Internet and will focus in particular on issues
such as transparency, reasonable network management practices, differences in
treatment of fixed and mobile broadband services, specialized services, and
technical standards," according to the FCC.
The FCC says the first meeting will be primarily procedural,
but may also get into some of those issues.
The committee is chaired by Harvard law and computer science
professor Jonathan Zittrain and co-chaired by MIT research scientist David
Clark. Also on the 21-member committee is Kevin McElearney, senior VP of
network engineering for Comcast.
It was Comcast's challenge to the FCC's BitTorrent decision
sanctioning Comcast's disruption of peer-to-peer file transfer that helped spur
the FCC's codification and expansion of its Internet openness principles after
a court threw out the FCC's ruling.
The creation of the multistakeholder advisory committee was
part of a rule compromise that included cable and phone stakeholders working to
avoid the "nuclear option" of classification of Internet access as a
telecom service subject to mandatory access rules.
The rules have been in effect since last fall, and there
have so far been no official FCC complaints about discrimination, though there
has been some concern from activist groups and some over-the-top providers
about data caps and private network content deliver, the latter which the FCC
exempted from neutrality rules with a pledge to monitor the marketplace and
weigh in if needed.
