At the Center of the Net Neutrality Debate
"The unlocked door means that occasionally you might have a devil come in, but a locked door means you have a thousand angels walking by." So opens the "Barbershop Punk" trailer, a film about a groundbreaking case in the net neutrality debate.
The film centers around Robb Topolski's 2007 run-in with Comcast after he had difficulty sharing public domain music files featuring barbershop quartet music. Topolski found out that the company was intentionally restricting P2P (peer-to-peer) file transfers and announced this on an online bulletin board, a revelation that resulted in the FCC taking action to force Comcast to change its practice and allow such file transfers - a decision that Comcast is in the process of appealing.
On Tuesday, Kojo, "Barbershop Punk" director, producer and writer Georgia Sugimura Archer, Robb Topolski, who's now the New America Foundation's Chief Technologist for the Open Technology Initiative, and others discuss how the net neutrality debate has exploded during the past few years and explore how Topolski unwittingly sparked one of the most crucial philosophical and legal debates in the Internet's history.
