Stephen Lawson reports here on BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker’s comments about net neutrality regulation at the eComm conference yesterday. Klinker used the word “regulation” to mean a couple different things in his remarks, but nothing he said justifies the headline PC World gave the story.

Here’s Lawson reporting Klinker’s comments:

“There is no ambiguity. There is not going to be, at least in the near term, a strong regulator for broadband,” Klinker told the eComm conference in Burlingame, California. Instead, it is the public that will pass judgment on how service and application providers behave, Klinker said. “The public is our regulator.”

“The public is our regulator.” But PC World ran the story under this headline:

“Broadband Has No Regulator, BitTorrent CEO Says.”

It will not be a government regulator; it will be the public. Perhaps Klinker regards the public as a weak regulator, but PC World takes the public to be no regulator at all. Stupendous.

Even the strongest skeptic of markets believes that the public has some influence on businesses’ decisions and actions. With inaccurate headlines like this, PC World could stand to learn what market regulation is like when readers stop reading and advertisers stop advertising.

It’s worth noting that Klinker almost certainly helped incite and organize public reaction to the Comcast Kerfuffle, enjoying a PR coup that is still paying his company dividends. Klinker knows a little bit about how markets regulate.

In several of our previous podcasts (see episodes 34, 35,and 37), we’ve discussed what we’ve called the “Comcast Kerfuffle,” which was the controversy surrounding the steps Comcast took to manage BitTorrent traffic on its networks. Critics called it a violation of Net neutrality principles while Comcast and others called it sensible network management.

This week we saw a new kerfuffle of sorts develop over the revelation in a Monday front-page Wall Street Journal story that Google had approached major cable and phone companies and supposedly proposed to create a fast lane for its own content. What exactly is it that Google is proposing, and does it mean – as the Wall Street Journal and some others have suggested – that Google is somehow going back on their support for Net neutrality principles and regulation? More importantly, what does it all mean for the future of the Internet, network management, and consumers. That’s what we discussed on the TLF’s latest “Tech Policy Weekly” podcast.

Today’s 30-minute discussion featured two of our regular contributors at the TLF, who both wrote about this issue multiple times this week. Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote about the issue here and here, and Bret Swanson of the Progress & Freedom Foundation wrote about it here and here.  To help us wade through some of the more technical networking issues in play, we were also joined on the podcast by Richard Bennett, a computer scientist and network engineer guru who blogs at Broadband Politics as well as Circle ID and he also pens occasional columns for The Register.  Also appearing on the show was Adam Marcus, Research Fellow & Senior Technologist at PFF, who wrote a “nuts and bolts” essay full of excellent technical background on edge caching and net neutrality.

You can download the MP3 file here, or use the online player below to start listening to the show right now.

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