A gang of women known as the Raging Grannies greeted attendees at Thursday’s Federal Communications Committee (FCC) hearing on net neutrality held by Stanford Law School at Dinkelspiel Auditorium. The grannies sung “We Need Internet Freedom” set to the tune of “God Bless America” to members entering the auditorium.

The hearing came about because of BitTorrent, peer-to-peer software that allows its users to exchange content such as music and video. A peer-to-peer network is a decentralized network in which users are directly connected to other users’ computers. These networks, such as BitTorrent allow file sharing, while others, such as Skype allow people to speak to each other over the Internet for free.

Comcast was recently caught restricting customer access to BitTorrent traffic but argued that it should have the ability to control its network under “reasonable network management” practices in order to avoid the network becoming congested and thus slowing down the Internet for all the company’s users.

Comcast officials, however, as well as representatives from the other broadband giants, were not present at the hearing. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said that Comcast and other broadband providers had been invited to testify but chose not to attend.

“I do wish there were some network operators here to answer questions,” Commissioner Robert McDowell said. “I am very disappointed that they aren’t here.”

In a public statement on Thursday, Comcast said that it had appeared at the previous commission hearing at Harvard and felt no need to attend another hearing.

“[Comcast has] already appeared before the Commission on network management issues and has made extensive filings at the FCC both on our past and current practices as well as our recent announcements,” said a Comcast spokeswoman in a statement released by the provider. “We felt issues specific to us were well covered at the first hearing and the focus of this event should be broader than any individual company’s issues.”

While Comcast declined the FCC invite, AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner Cable also turned down invitations. Free Press, an advocacy group that promotes diversity in media, has made allegations that Verizon has been caught blocking text messages and that AT&T reportedly wants to inspect and filter Web traffic.

Comcast worked to prove that it did not wish to restrict access to any particular application by striking a deal with BitTorrent last month. Under the deal, Comcast said it would attempt to change its network management practices on its network to analyze data in a “protocol agnostic” way. Comcast publicly admitted to “delaying” uploads to the BitTorrent protocol at peak congestion times, but under the new practice, Comcast would likely manage traffic according to how much bandwidth consumers use, rather than what sort of applications they’re running.

BitTorrent Chief Technology Officer Eric Klinker said in a statement that the initiative was to develop “techniques that the Internet community will find to be more transparent.”

But Robb Topolski, the software quality engineer who first discovered Comcast’s blocking methods did not see the benefits of the agreement with BitTorrent.

“The situation continues today,” he said at the hearing. “It has not stopped, despite all the wonderful agreements between BitTorrent and Comcast. I’m a ham radio operator. And Comcast is jamming authorized communication [on the Internet]. I ask that before you {the FCC] leave today you signal your intent to stop these interferences.”

Comcast’s absence at Thursday’s hearing was certainly felt. George Ou, an independent consultant and former network engineer, was notably alone in his support of Comcast’s and other ISPs’ abilities to throttle traffic. He argued that ISPs should have the right to defend themselves against the peer-to-peer networks which consume the majority of the traffic on the Internet.

“Video is causing a new collapse [of the Internet]. It requires a 100- to 1000-fold increase in capacity to deal with current crisis.”

Ou referred to traffic figures from Japan — where there are larger bandwidths — which showed that 1 percent of Japan’s Internet users comprised 47 percent of the data traffic. He pointed out that since 90 percent of the population was only left with 25 percent of the Internet capacity, network traffic management was vital to the Internet. He argued that without better restrictions, the Internet was highly unfair.

“It is a common misconception that more bandwidth solves all problems,” he said.