The Save The Internet Coalition, a coalition of consumer advocates like the Consumers Union (authors of Consumer Reports) and the Free Press, is claiming 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: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 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:A video of the hearing is now available at the FCC website (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).