A longtime friend of Obama’s, Genachowski served as an adviser on technology policy during the 2008 campaign. During the Clinton administration, he served as chief counsel to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt. He’s a ’Net Neutrality advocate. And more importantly, he’s generally well respected by industry and consumer-activist groups alike–something that wasn’t particularly true of former Chairman Kevin Martin. Under his leadership, industry insiders expect the FCC to be far more transparent than it was during Martin’s reign. Here’s hoping that proves true.

Now Martin has circled back with a new version of his wireless broadband plan, one free of the content-filtering requirements that had made it so controversial. “[If filtering] is a problem for people, let’s take it away,” Martin told Ars Technica. “A lot of public interest advocates have said they would support this, but [they were] concerned about the filter. Well, now there’s an item in front of the Commissioners and it no longer has the filter. And I’ve already voted for it without the filter now. So it’s already got one vote.”

If Martin can muster more support for this revised plan, it could be put up for a vote as early as Jan. 15.

…the licensee for the 2155-2180 MHz spectrum to provide–using up to 25 percent of its wireless network capacity–free, two-way broadband Internet service at engineered data rates of at least 768 kbps downstream. Additional obligations associated with the licensee’s free broadband service would include a requirement to provide a network-based filtering mechanism for the free Internet service in order to protect children and families.”

Quite a goal, “protecting children and families” from government-defined obscenity. A daunting one, though. As a wise man once said, “You can’t take something off the Internet…. That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.” And in Internet porn’s case, it’s like trying to take it out of a cesspool.

In essence, Comcast opens its customers’ mail because it wants to deliver mail not based on the address on the envelope but on the type of letter contained therein.”

– Federal Communications Commission order

Saying it wants to “send a message to the industry that bad actors will end up being punished,” the Federal Communications Commission punished Comcast with a precedent-setting reprimand today for slowing some Internet traffic. “Comcast was delaying subscribers’ downloads and blocking their uploads. It was doing so 24/7, regardless of the amount of congestion on the network or how small the file might be,” said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. “Even worse, Comcast was hiding that fact by making affected users think there was a problem with their Internet connection or the application. Today, the Commission tells Comcast to stop.”

Well, three-fifths of the Commission, anyway. There were two dissenting votes, which will almost certainly figure prominently in those legal options Comcast (CMCSA) says it is considering. From Commissioner Robert McDowell’s dissent:

For the first time, today our government is choosing regulation over collaboration when it comes to Internet governance. The majority has thrust politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions. It will be interesting to see how the FCC will handle its newly created power because, as an institution, we are incapable of deciding any issue in the nanoseconds of Internet time. Furthermore, asking our government to make these decisions will mean that every two-to-four years the ground rules could change depending on election results. Internet engineers will find it difficult, if not impossible, to operate in a climate like that. … Will other countries like China follow suit and be able to regulate American companies’ network management practices, with effects that could be felt here? How do we know where to draw the line given that the Internet is an interconnected global network of networks? Given the Internet’s interconnectivity, are we now starting a global race to the lowest common denominator of maximum government regulation, all in the name, ironically, of Internet freedom?”

And just how does the FCC propose to do this?

By asking Comcast to change its ways.

Rather than sanctioning the company, the FCC will require Comcast (CMCSA) to stop interfering with Internet traffic on its network, explain to the Commission how it has blocked such traffic in the past and publicly disclose how it plans to manage its network in the future. “We would tell Comcast that they have to stop engaging in that practice,” Martin said earlier this month. “They have to disclose to the commission where they are engaging in that practice.”

The proposal will be put to a final vote Aug. 1. If it’s approved it could set a precedent that will undoubtedly inspire other Internet service providers to rethink their “traffic management” practices as Comcast has.

But once the Commission’s done that, XM (XM) and Sirius (SIRI)–the only two satellite radio players in the market–can finally join to create the pay-radio monopoly they’ve long planned. “I was hoping to forge a bipartisan solution that would offer consumers more diversity in programming, better price protection, greater choices among innovative devices and real competition with digital radio,” said
Jonathan S. Adelstein, an FCC commissioner who’s opposed the merger on the grounds that it’s against the public interest to let the only two companies in a particular business combine. “Instead, it appears they’re going to get a monopoly with window dressing.”

No. Better to let history make itself, as it always has, and focus on making news. And it’s likely there will be quite a bit of it coming out of D: All Things Digital 6. With this year’s lineup, how could there not? Microsoft’s Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer onstage together just a month before Gates steps back from his day-to-day duties as company chairman. Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes talking strategy as the media giant prepares to spin off Time Warner Cable and tries to figure out just what the hell to do with AOL. Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless (VZ) and FCC Chaiman Kevin Martin appearing separately, but together offering an insider view of the telecom industry as it grapples with issues of Net neutrality, open access and early termination fees. And then there’s Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang and Sue Decker, who’ve been struggling to right a foundering Internet pioneer as it battles Google (GOOG), Microsoft, investor-agitator Carl Icahn and itself.

And that’s just a sampling. Clearly, there’s much to talk about. Much news to be made.

Sure, we may not have managed to arrange another tete-a-tete as historic as last year’s Gates/Jobs interview.

But we did manage to get Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang on the same stage–albeit at different times. Still, no easy feat, that.

And who knows, perhaps we’ll get them onstage together as well.

So join us at d6.allthingsd.com tomorrow for as-it-happens, all-access coverage of the conference. Liveblogs of the sessions and demos. Videos of the speakers. Photos of attendees. You’ll find it all here.

(Photo illustration by Beth Callaghan)

Broader issues? Like reasonable network-management practices? The responsibility to deliver traffic fairly? Service disclosures? The sort of issues that might figure prominently in a “P2P Bill of Rights?”

Guess not.

Anyway, Comcast has already scrapped its policy of deliberately slowing some traffic flowing over BitTorrent and other P2P networks, so there’s really no need for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to bust its chops anymore. As Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manger of its Internet service, told the New York Times, Comcast’s new policy is to slow traffic based on usage pattern, not application. “[Our new technique] will be based purely on individual consumption by consumers,” Bowling said. “Anything in addition to that is outside the scope of what our network management goal is.”

So the company plans to throttle traffic to the customers that use the most bandwidth. Hmmm. I wonder who those might be? The folks who use the Internet for email and Web browsing or those who use it for downloading digital media?

It’s a Comcastic day for BitTorrent. This morning the cable provider, under fire for degrading the performance of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service on its broadband network, announced plans to develop better ways to manage peer-to-peer traffic. To that end, Comcast (CMCSA) will work with BitTorrent to develop a network capacity-management technique that is protocol agnostic.

Said Tony Werner, Comcast’s chief technology officer, “This new architecture would enable many new and emerging applications and will be based upon an open, nondiscriminatory framework that could interface with or support multiple technologies. We believe that P2P technology has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution, so we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks.”

Of course you do. You just didn’t realize it until FCC Chairman Kevin Martin pointed it out, right?

Anyway, like most such corporately altruistic pledges, this one has the potential to do more good than bad–or more bad than good. “… We must recognize that these are two commercial entities whose goals are, in the end, to make sure that their networks and technologies are as profitable as possible,” writes Public Knowledge’s Jef Pearlman. “One can conceive of a world where an ISP and an application developer band together to make a proprietary system in which sanctioned application data gets preferred treatment, the ISP gets greater control of the application running on your computer, and both companies are happy in the exact situation we want to prevent. Time will tell what this partnership actually means.”

The Federal Communications Commission isn’t buying Comcast’s (CMCSA) argument that throttling or degrading the performance of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service BitTorrent on its broadband network is a necessary traffic-management technique.

Speaking at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he’s considering taking action against the cable operator for violating the agency’s network-neutrality principles. Seems Martin was troubled by Comcast’s dissembling around the BitTorrent issue, not to mention its efforts to pack an FCC hearing on Net neutrality with its own employees.

“A hallmark of what should be seen as a reasonable business practice is certainly whether or not the people engaging in that practice are willing to describe it publicly,” said Martin, adding that the incident offered the commission a good opportunity to establish a precedent for future cases of this kind. “I have said in the past the commission is ready, willing and able to take action on individual complaints,” he said. “I think that is what we are going to end up doing, and I think that will end up setting an important precedent going forward: that we are willing to address individual complaints when they come in.”