[governance] IGP Alert: "Net Neutrality as Global Principle for Internet Governance"

[Danny Butt]

While I support many aspects of Milton et. al's paper, just to add a  
different point of view - net neutrality draws upon the history of  
common carriage in transportation and interpersonal communication;  
while the dominant business model for financing next generation  
internet networks (e.g. not those funded by telcos with historically  
government supported investment)  is that of audiovisual media, which  
is a different thing altogether.

The reason for this shift is because the Internet now carries video  
traffic more than anything else. According to Cisco, Internet video  
traffic in 2006 was more than the amount of traffic crossing the U.S.  
Internet backbone in 2000.

<http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/netsol/ns537/c654/ 
cdccont_0900aecd806a81a7.pdf>

It's easy to clamour for Net Neutrality, but harder to think about  
what a sustainable ISP industry might look like in this environment.  
We already see ISPs (e.g. bigpond in Australia) setting data caps  
while hosting video from "content partners" which doesn't count  
against a cap. This is a form of discrimination, variations on which  
will only increase as carriers attempt to deal with a radically  
increased traffic load from audiovisual media for which a telco  
business model is not well aligned.

In the media world, distributors fight for exclusive territorial  
rights for high-value content. It's on the basis of these pre-sales  
that the content gets funded in the first place. I don't think that  
the media companies are doing a great job of engaging with the  
Internet environment, but it's not likely that the entire business  
model for film production is going to change because technology  
policy analysts would like to see an open access model in place. When  
the paper says "Given the ease with which the Internet’s architecture  
facilitates global connectivity, there is no reason why a right to  
access Internet resources should end
at a country’s borders" it is saying to the media and entertainment  
industries "Your business model has no reason to exist." That's an  
ideological debate that's not really worth getting into, but I'd just  
say that at a practical level it makes the paper's interest in  
"aligning the WTO regime with the global Internet governance regime"  
pretty unrealistic given that a key feature of the WTO has been  
mostly about developed nations ability to enforce Intellectual  
Property Regimes that support the ability of content owners to price  
and content discriminate among nation-state markets. This has little  
to do with local content exceptions anymore and everything to do with  
the basic business model of screen production which is based on  
territorial excludability.

I really support the anti-censorship and access to content agenda the  
IGP paper attempts to articulate, but I'm not sure that doing it  
though an iconoclastic interpretation of the Network Neutrality  
discussion (which, like it or not, *is* dominated by US domestic  
policy analysis) is really the best way to do that.

I also tire of the distinctly U.S. anti-governmental rhetoric in the  
paper (governments are routinely "overbearing", interest in  
government intervention is "unfortunate") when the US is in the WTO  
pushing every nation to abandon government supported  
telecommunications and media infrastructure in order to smooth the  
access for its own industries, at the expense of industry development  
in the rest of the world. A more agnostic approach to the role of  
actors in Internet development would help a good deal.  If we're  
interested in "the public", it's worth remembering that governments  
(despite their many flaws) have been the only mechanism that can be  
realistically be made subject to effective political influence in the  
public interest.

Regards,

Danny

--
http://www.dannybutt.net


On 7/11/2007, at 10:14 PM, Gao Mosweu wrote:

> Dan and Garth,
>
>   Thanks for explaining this in such a simple and practical manner!  
> The concept of "common carriage" and "public utility" enable one to  
> look at this practically and to appreciate it more.
>
>   Thank you very much once again for the enlightenment.
>
>   Regards,
>
>   Gao Mosweu
>   Verdure (Pty) Ltd
>   Botswana
>
>
>
>
> Garth Graham <garth.graham at telus.net> wrote:
>   On 6-Nov-07, at 11:30 AM, Dan Krimm wrote:
>
>> First, the principle of "net neutrality" has deep roots, emerging
>> out of
>> British Common Law: it was originally called "common carriage" and it
>> applies to all sorts of transport systems with network topology that
>> creates gatekeeper bottlenecks (originally, ferries over rivers,
>> extended
>> to toll bridges, then to telecommunications, etc.). The idea was
>> that it
>> was unfair (and bad for the economy) for gatekeepers to leverage  
>> their
>> monopoly control over constrained points of public transit in any
>> way that
>> involves discrimination between different people who need transit.
>>
>> In cases where the Internet rises to the level of "public utility"
>> in its
>> importance to society, these principles apply to the Internet.
>
> On a historical note, the Judge in the Vancouver Community Network's
> case on it's charitable status made reference to that principle of
> Common Law in describing the nature of the Internet.
>
> Excerpts from the Reasons for Judgment of Hugesson, J.A., Pratte,
> J.A., concurring, in the case of Vancouver Regional FreeNet
> Association (appellant) v. Minister of National Revenue (respondent),
> Federal Court of Appeal, A-413-94, Heard at Vancouver (B.C.) on
> Monday, June 10, 1996. Judgment rendered at Ottawa (Ontario) on
> Monday, July 8, 1996.
>
> http://www2.vcn.bc.ca/excerpts
>
> GG
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