“An ISP contemplating a new or revised network management practice would submit a request to the BITAG asking for a review of the practice,” he said.
If a special committee of a working group accepts the request, he said, it would be assigned to a subcommittee.
That might sound very bureaucratic, but at that point the engineers would start making technical headway. The first step is to understand how the practice works from a technical perspective.
“The subcommittee would then study the practice in order to determine how the new or revised practice might affect a user’s Internet experience, including the impact on applications, content or devices,” Hatfield said.
If “sufficiently significant adverse impacts” were found, he said, “we are hopeful that such an objective assessment would lead to voluntary changes in the proposed technique or, in some cases, if the adverse consequences are severe enough, even its abandonment.”
The subcommittee would prepare a technical report on its findings. The process, Hatfield said, could “reduce the chance of miscommunication/misunderstanding and the chance of litigation.”
If someone went to the FCC with a complaint about the technique, as intervenors did in the Comcast incident, the technical report could serve as a resource.
“The agency involved would have [in the report] relevant technical information with which it could then address any normative decisions that might be necessary,” he said.
That helps the agency, he said.
“That is, the agency would be in a much better position to expeditiously determine whether or not the intended public benefits of the new or revised technique sufficiently outweigh any adverse impact on applications, content or devices.”
Hatfield is a professor at the University of Colorado and a former chief technologist at the FCC.