The Save The Internet Coalition, a coalition of consumer advocates like the Consumers Union (authors of Consumer Reports) and the Free Press, is claiming [1] that Comcast bussed in a large number of disinterested individuals to yesterday's public FCC hearing at Harvard on network neutrality and traffic shaping. The group is claiming Comcast paid these individuals so those seats would not be filled with interested, question-asking participants. Many didn't even know what the meeting was about:

They arrived en masse some 90 minutes before the hearing began and occupied almost every available seat, upon which many promptly fell asleep. One told us that he was "just getting paid to hold someone's seat." (audio [2]) He added that he had no idea what the meeting was about. Many of this early crowd had mysteriously matching yellow highlighters stuck in their lapels. We also photographed them outside the venue being handed papers by an organizer who had been seen earlier talking with several of the Comcast people at the hearing.

Attendees say those who weren't napping applauded loudly at the end of Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen's presentation. Cohen spent the day deflecting criticism of Comcast's decision to throttle upstream BitTorrent traffic via forged TCP packets.

Update: Portfolio [3] says that Comcast has admitted to hiring the people, but claims they were simply being used as line placeholders so that company employees could attend the hearing. However, the fact remains these "placeholders" stayed through the meeting prohibiting others from attending:

Comcast spokewoman Jennifer Khoury said 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.

A video of the hearing is now available at the FCC website [4] (albeit in Real Player format). It's increasingly clear that if the FCC does anything at all, it will likely be to require greater transparency in exactly how ISPs manage their networks. That should allow broadband consumers to make an intelligent choice between ISPs that throttle upstream P2P traffic and boot egregious bandwidth users (Comcast), and providers who do not (Verizon).