[ NNSquad ] Text of my prepared remarks for the Stanford FCC hearing

[Brett Glass <nnsquad@brettglass.com>]

All:

On Wednesday of this week, I was on a roof installing service for a 
customer when I received a call from the FCC asking if I would 
speak at the Stanford hearing on network management practices. I 
finished installing the radio, came down from the roof, turned the 
radio on, begged the customer's pardon for taking a few extra 
minutes, and immediately used the new rural broadband connection to 
book an expensive last minute trip to Palo Alto. I then drove to 
the Denver airport through a whiteout snowstorm to make the plane.

As the only Internet service provider who agreed to speak at the 
hearing, I'd hoped to have sufficient time to at least begin to 
represent the concerns of an entire industry -- including the 4,000 
to 8,000 small, independent ISPs who are currently striving to 
forestall a cable/telco duopoly. Unfortunately, while Professor 
Larry Lessig was allowed to deliver a lengthy sermon that was long 
on rhetoric but short on facts (and which contained nothing that 
the Commissioners had not heard before), I was able to speak for 
only eight minutes and could deliver only about half of my prepared remarks.

Those remarks are posted on my Web site at

http://www.brettglass.com/remarks.html

Unfortunately, the press, which tends to understand issues only in 
a very "binary" way and tends to ignore any entity which is not a 
large corporation or opposing the actions of a large corporation, 
barely reported on the remarks I made or the issues that I raised 
-- even though they are vital to the availability of competitive 
broadband options. I can only hope that, after reading the remarks 
above, they'll take greater interest. It's vital to the future of 
broadband in this country.

--Brett Glass