Congressional Hearings

[Carl Malamud <carl () trystero malamud com>]

I wanted to explain a bit more my understanding of why we
are delaying the congressional hearings.  Please be very
clear that I do not represent the committee and that this
explanation is being sent in my capacity as the organizer
of the Internet Town Hall.

The Internet Town Hall depends on voluntary donations from a
large number of parties.  For this Internet Town Hall, we've
had a tremendous outpouring of support from groups such as
O'Reilly & Associates, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, ARPA, Empirical
Tools and Technologies, UUNET, Metropolitan Fiber Systems,
and many others.

The purpose of this broad coalition is to demonstrate how the
Internet works and how the Internet can be made to work in the
congressional process.  We wanted to make the point that there
exists a general-purpose infrastructure that allows everything
from email to IRC chat to WAIS databases to the World Wide Web
to be accessed.

One of the key things we wanted to show the Congress was how 
audio and video can work over a general purpose infrastructure 
such as the Internet.  Rather than transmit video over the key 
transit networks, which tend to get overloaded during events 
such as the Internet Town Hall, ARPA had agreed to furnish the 
use of DARTNET, the experimental advanced research network they operate.

The underlying transmission facilities for DARTNET are operated
by Sprint.  In order for the National Press Club, the headquarters
site for the facility, to be part of DARTNET we required a T1
line from our facility to the Sprint point of presence a few
blocks away.  We had requested Sprint to provide that T1 line
and become part of the Internet Town Hall.

In the course of examining our request, Sprint postulated that
furnishing a T1 line for a congressional hearing might violate
congressional ethics laws.  There are in fact laws on the books
that prohibit members of Congress or its committees from accepting
in-kind donations over a certain value under certain circumstances.
Sprint forwarded their concerns to the House Ethics Committee,
and then later informed the Subcommittee on Telecommunications
and Finance and my organization of their actions.

Needless to say, there are technical alternatives to the T1 line
that we asked Sprint to furnish.  In fact, a single call to
Metropolitan Fiber Systems resulted in a 10 Mbps virtual Ethernet
using ATM between Washington, D.C. and Boston which is available 
for the hearing when it does occur.

Even though the technical issue is solved, there still remains
the ethics concern.  We firmly believe that a broad industry/government
group volunteering time and money to show how the congressional
process can be changed to include more input from the general
public to be in the public interest.  However, we are equally
adamant that *ANY* ethical concerns *MUST* be cleared before
we proceed with the hearings.

The crux of the issue has to do with in-kind contributions.  If
you are testifying before Congress, it is clearly allowed to bring
in computers.  However, a donation to the underlying infrastructure
of the congressional committee might be construed as an expense
that must be reimbursed by the committee to the donor.  The purpose
of such laws is to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that
the congressional process is clean and not subject to the undue
influence of a particular interest group.

We believe that an on-line congressional hearing is in fact
a desirable thing, particularly given the broad coalition formed 
to establish the infrastructure.  However, we feel strongly that 
everybody involved in the process, whether they are familiar with 
the Internet or the law, must understand exactly what we intend 
to do and how those actions relate to the ethics laws.

As such, we will spend the next few months describing to congressional
officials exactly what we have in mind for the hearings.  Since this
will be a historical occasion, there is no precedent for on-line
hearings.  We want to make sure that everybody is very comfortable
with the issues and that officials believe that there is public
benefit in such a demonstration.

I'd like to thank all the volunteers for their time and effort
to date.  A tremendous amount of behind the scenes efforts has
already taken place and we're hoping to salvage some of that
effort so we don't have to start from scratch.  I'd also like
to thank everybody on the network who sent in letters.  The
Subcommittee and Congressman Markey were truly impressed at
the volume and the quality of the commentary from the public
through e-mail and are looking forward to a successful on-line
hearing later in the year.

Sincerely,

Carl Malamud
Internet Multicasting Service