DVR Chatter

Comcast paid people off the street to attend yesterday's FCC hearing about their network neutrality violations in an apparent attempt to deny access to other interested (opposing) parties.

Broadband giant Comcast—the subject of the F.C.C. hearing on network neutrality at the Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—acknowledged that it [went to the trouble of hiring people off the street to pack a Federal Communications Commission meeting yesterday].

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.

Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

[...]

Craig Aaron, a spokesman for Free Press, one of the groups that filed the complaint against Comcast, denounced the company's tactics.

"The sad thing about this is that literally hundreds of people who were not paid to stand in line, or paid by their employer to attend, were prevented from even entering the building," Aaron said.

[...]

A number of people in the audience wore yellow highlighter marking pens on their shirts or jackets; Karr said that was to identify them to Comcast employees coordinating the company's appearance at the event. Khoury acknowledged that Comcast coordinated the employees that it brought to the hearing.