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Web 2.0 Summit program chair John Battelle moderated a public policy discussion with Art Brodsky, the communications director of Public Knowledge, Ebay's Tod Cohen and Amazon.com's Paul Misener.

A Seattle-based security researcher has devised a way to test for Net neutrality. Dan Kaminsky will share details of this technique, which will eventually be rolled into a free software tool, on Wednesday at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas. The software can tell if computers are treating some types of TCP/IP traffic better than others -- dropping data that is being used in VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls, for example, or treating encrypted data as second class.

The U.S. Congress has network neutrality under scrutiny and perhaps under threat. Network neutrality is the concept that broadband carriers will neither interfere with nor inhibit the free flow of information over the Internet. A bill, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Efficiency Act of 2006, or COPE (aka the Barton-Rush Act), is making its way through the House of Representatives. It could empower commercial broadband carriers like Sprint and AT&T to manipulate Internet transactions by prohibiting or slowing access to and transmission of specific sites. In effect, the buzz is that the House proposes to cede control of the Internet to the telecoms and cable companies. By contrast, there are bills being introduced in the Senate that seek to protect network neutrality. First among these is S. 2360, the proposed Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006. 1, 2