When the Federal Communications Commission takes the stage at Dinkelspiel Auditorium for its second hearing on broadband, it’ll be taking a trip down memory lane.

For one, the precise topic of the hearing — what types of control broadband owners have and ought to have over content, applications or technologies that run on broadband infrastructures — is relevant to Stanford history. More than thirty years ago, innovators like Vinton Cerf (now Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist) were likely to be found considering the value of neutrality in the design of ARPANET, one of the precursors to the Internet. It was Cerf who, together with Robert E. Kahn at the University of California-Los Angeles, pioneered the TCP/IP protocol suite. This protocol is the original lingua franca of the Internet, enabling data to travel without discrimination from server to server throughout the Internet until that data reaches its destination.

Today, neutral network design principles are being debated once again — albeit with much higher stakes for a wider (and still growing) population of Internet users and for a capital-rich group of broadband providers. Many citizens and consumers increasingly rely on applications or technologies that owners of broadband networks prefer to block or otherwise control. Why? As property holders of major portions of this country’s communication infrastructure, providers like Comcast want to move away from neutral principles and get users to “pay to play.” In Comcast’s eyes, someone who uses peer-to-peer (P2P) software is taking up bandwidth and not adding to their bottom line.

The logic of blocking and of pay-to-play schemes proposed by broadband providers is, however, highly flawed. Tiered access — what the industry euphemistically calls “quality of service” — doesn’t serve citizens or consumers. Instead, such corporate practices unfairly discriminate against certain types of speech, by slowing or preventing access to content, applications or technologies that refuse to pay toll prices for data transmission or that merely seem suspicious. Under a tiered access scheme, a person using — or even studying! — P2P technologies for legal file-sharing would be under threat. So would a person who simply can’t afford the higher priced service. In other words, neutrality is more desirable — not only for the legacy that Cerf, Kahn and others passed down to future Internet generations, but also for the sake of academic freedom, free speech and equality.

The FCC’s trip down memory lane isn’t only about Internet history or Internet freedom. It’s also about doing — or redoing — democracy. In many respects, the hearing at Stanford is an attempt to make up for a botched event on the same topic at Harvard held last February. Controversy erupted when Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury admitted that Comcast had hired people to attend the event. Rather than hearing from the public, the Commission was treated to a room full of seat-warmers whose presence prevented other interested members of the public from having a voice and speaking to broadband issues. In other words, the Harvard event was little more than a sham and an embarrassing episode in the FCC’s rulemaking process.

Whether the FCC can get it right this time and foster a substantive debate may be another issue altogether. From the classroom (such as Stanford’s undergraduate course in the “First Amendment in the Digital Era”) to community centers (at places like One East Palo Alto, Bay Area Video Coalition and Oakland’s Center for Media Justice), many are poised to weigh in about broadband and fair network practices. But, even if a broader range of stakeholders finds a seat in the room or a place on the dais at Dinkelspiel, participation is certainly no guarantee of influence. As the six hearings from the FCC’s recent high-profile media ownership debate demonstrated, an outraged public can turn out, testify for hours on end and do very little to persuade the Commission to vote in its favor.

What is needed is not only a hearing in front of the FCC but also a chance for the public to be heard and hear each other in the broader public sphere. In other words, we need a national dialogue on the future of this country’s communication infrastructure that includes citizens, consumers and Congress, not just the Commission and industry actors. Stanford is a fitting place to begin that dialogue. Let’s hope it continues.

Seeta Pena Gangadharan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communications. Shinjoung Yeo is a Communication Librarian with Stanford Libraries.