[governance] Net neutrality & IG

[William Drake]

Hi,

Aside from being an element of Parminder's 'publicness' theme proposal, there's generally been little discussion on the list of the NN issue.  Three Sunday afternoon prompted by news items:

According to the Benton Foundation, Bush just signed legislation effectively ending the game in the US by giving network operators what they want www.benton.org/index.php?q=node/1946.  The assault on NN could now spread.  The ITU's recent Next Generation Network workshop was interesting in this regard.  Operators in a number of countries are already switching from legacy circuit switched PSTNs to packet switched IP-based networks capable of delivery all IP-enabled services, including video, and more will follow.  They will all want to recoup these investments, capture new markets (or compensate for losses in old ones, e.g. due to VOIP), and presumably seek to provide differentiated QoS.  One would think operators in many countries will be emboldened  by the US carriers' win to push for the same treatment, arguing inter alia that they have to have the same opportunities as the US firms due to globalization and potential competition to deliver cross-border services.  

NN might seem to be a topic on which there are not shared or generally applicable international rules in place, aka IG.  This may be wrong on at least two counts.  First, there's a lot of standards work under way to create the conditions for convergent IP-enabled services and by extension QoS differentiation.  Second, the biggest hole in the IG debate has been attention to the fact that in monopolistic or oligopolistic markets, companies may in effect set internationally applicable rules through their daily business practices and strategies without having formally negotiated a shared framework.  Major operators with significant market power pursuing symmetric strategies could in effect reshape the net in some respects.  And of course, policy coordination could emerge.  As with interconnection pricing and developments in the 'security' field, supposedly dusty old telecom operators and institutions could prove more important to IG than some people want to believe.

Tim Berners-Lee recently said in an interview that absent NN, "It stops being the Net... It would no longer be an open information space."  Maybe we should push for him being a keynoter on this theme in Athens, governments et al. undoubtedly would like some big name speakers...
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1143499812060&call_pageid=968350072197&StarSource=RSS

Best,

Bill


 *******************************************************
William J. Drake  drake at hei.unige.ch
Director, Project on the Information
  Revolution and Global Governance
  Graduate Institute for International Studies
  Geneva, Switzerland 
President, Computer Professionals for 
   Social Responsibility
http://www.cpsr.org/board/drake 
*******************************************************

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