The co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama's FCC transition team is a World of Warcraft geek.

That word comes by way of GigaOm, where Wagner James Au writes that Wharton Prof. Kevin Werbach (left), a Net Neutrality advocate is steering the Obama team's takeover of the FCC (presumably between WoW raids).

In fact, Werbach belongs to a pair of WoW guilds. He wrote of his gaming in a 2006 blog post:

I play Warcraft because it’s fun. It’s taking time away from watching TV, reading books, and other entertainment pursuits. But I’m also playing because I believe MMOGs will be one of the primary forms of social software for the next decade. Defined broadly, they may become the dominant form of social software. And you can’t understand games without experiencing them first-hand...

 

What [WoW] does is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, including those within the business world...

As Au notes, Werbach's WoW experience is a plus, since online gamers have a major stake in the Net Neutrality issue. Also of note, Werbach's co-chair, Michigan Prof. Susan Crawford, is an admirer of Second Life:

Professor Crawford, a board member at ICANN, also counts herself “a huge fan of Second Life” for the way it lets users retain IP rights to their content (though she confesses to difficulty when it comes to moving her SL avatar around.)

GP: We're dying to know - does Werbach play Horde or Alliance?

Click To Play

On Saturday at PAX, Entertainment Consumers Association president Hal Halpin and Spike TV's Geoff Keighley veered from the typical panel format by offering a "casual conversation."

For the better part of an hour Hal and Geoff discussed a variety of topics of importance to gamers. Hal also took a number of questions from attendees.

We've got the video, and it's worth checking out...

FULL DISCLOSURE DEPT: The ECA is the parent company of GamePolitics.

Worried that your ISP is choking your bandwidth?

Then jump over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF has released Switzerland, a free tool with which users can "test the integrity" of their Internet connection. Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney, remarked:

The sad truth is that the FCC is ill-equipped to detect ISPs interfering with your Internet connection. It's up to concerned Internet users to investigate possible network neutrality violations, and EFF's Switzerland software is designed to help with that effort. Comcast isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, ISP to meddle surreptitiously with its subscribers' Internet communications for its own benefit.

Peter Eckersley, EFF Staff Technologist and designer of Switzerland, added:

Until now, there hasn't been a reliable way to tell if somebody -- a hacker, an ISP, corporate firewall, or the Great Firewall of China -- is modifying your Internet traffic en route. The few tests available have been for narrow and specific kinds of interference, or have required tremendous amounts of advanced forensic labor. Switzerland is designed to make general-purpose ISP testing faster and easier.

Switzerland is described as an open source, command-line tool which will sniff out whether your ISP has modified or injected packets of data in your connection.

Via: boingboing

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), who both outraged and amused Net Neutrality advocates with his 2006 assertion that the Internet was a series of tubes, is reportedly now facing a series of federal allegations.

As reported by MarketWatch:

Sen. Ted Stevens has been indicted on criminal charges related to his business dealings in his home state, the Justice Department is expected to announce Tuesday.

 

Stevens, 84 years old... is up for reelection this year and has served in the Senate for 40 years... Last year, USA Today reported that federal agents searched Stevens's Alaska residence as part of a wide-ranging public corruption investigation.

 

Stevens faces seven counts of false statements involving VECO, the oil services company in Alaska, and the renovations done on his home...

Is Net Neutrality an important issue for gamers?

You bet.

If you're not sure why, check out Every Time You Vote Against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf, which explains how online gaming will suffer if the big telecommunications firms win and Net Neutrality loses.

That's why the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) has joined with the SaveTheInternet coalition and is backing Net Neutrality legislation proposed by Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA).

For gamers, the stakes are indeed high. So high, apparently, that Comcast, which opposes Net Neutrality, hired people off the street to fill seats (see pic) at a recent FCC hearing on the issue. The tactic prevented some opposition voices from gaining access. As reported by Conde Nast Portfolio:
 

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... 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...

Some audience members appeared to sleep through the proceedings... Other applauded enthusiastically when Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen delivered key points in his presentation.

Free Press spokesman Craig Aaron criticized Comcast's actions:
 

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.

Added Free Press campaign director Timothy Karr:
 

The only reason these people were in the room, it seemed to me, was to keep seats warm and exclude others.

The Consumerist has more.

Full Disclosure Dept: The Entertainment Consumers Association is the parent company of GamePolitics.