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

[Veni Markovski]

Danny and all,

At 00:30 11/8/2007  +1300, Danny Butt wrote:

>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


The problem about the Net Neutrality in the USA has its roots in the 
fact that there's no real competition in the USA. There are only a 
couple of providers - TimeWarner Cable, verizon and may be a third 
one (I say "may be", because I've seen for example advertisements for 
Earthlink, but on the TWC cables).
Such a problem would not exist, if there was competition. But, then, 
it is easier to "fight" the government, than to actually promote 
competition on the market. The US market has to find a way to 
introduce real competition on the broadband market. Until it is done, 
there will always be possibilities to introduce ideas like charging 
the content providers.
Similar ideas, btw, existed in Bulgaria 10 years ago, and were 
introduced by... the biggest at that time content provider, which 
wanted to charge the ISP (carriers) for the fact that it  provide the 
ISP users with content, and if it wasn't for the content provider, 
the users would not use the Internet at all. The result was immediate 
introduction of hundreds of portals and web sites, and this portal is 
no longer the biggest.

Veni 

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance