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

[Milton L Mueller]

>Would carriers be liable if they knew?
>For example, let's say I am a carrier and one of my users hosts nazi 
>stuff on a website at home, connected through his DSL connection. 
>Someone comes and warns me about that. Should I be allowed to terminate

>the contract? Would I be liable if I do? Would I be liable if I don't?

In other words, notice and takedown. That's a halfway house between
neutrality/common carrier and non-neutrality. 
The benefit, as you note, is that it is ex post rather than ex ante. The
downside is that you can get almost anything taken down, or impose major
costs on those engaged in expression, simply by filing a complaint. And
the carrier gets enmeshed in monitoring and surveillance of user
content, and in passing judgment on it. 

I'd prefer to avoid that. NN and free expression purists would say, No,
the carrier shouldn't be responsible for taking it down. If the nazi
stuff is illegal at the home where it is hosted, then go prosecute the
guy posting it. If it's not illegal where it's hosted, then leave it
alone. 

>And where do platform for user-generated content fit 
>in your plan? Would Youtube be responsible for illegal 
>videos? (I'm not thinking of IPRs, rather of racist 
>videos, violent videos etc.) At least after getting 
>proper notice? From which authority?

YouTube is a web platform, not a network or carrier. We must be careful
not to confuse the two, although maybe the line can blur in specific
cases. As a private platform, YouTube can publish or not publish
anything it wants, based on its own terms of service. It may indeed be
wise to shield it from liability for things that it does not know about,
and this is an environment in which the notice and takedown model makes
a lot of sense, but that is a policy and legal issue that does not the
same as the NN debate. Broadband network neutrality does not mean every
publisher or forum on the internet has to be "neutral." IGP's web site
can discriminate in favor of our own papers....we do not have to publish
yours. That ability actually enhances free expression rather than
limiting it.

Note also how sticky the issues you pose are: what is "racist" or
"violent" or "too sexual" is often highly contested and subjective. Do
you want things to be yanked off the net whenever those charges are
made? By whom? 

>spam and botnets and all sorts of bad stuff thrive on 
>irresponsible carriers who do not feel the need to abide 
>by their duty of good netizens.

spam and cybercrime are....crimes, with a clear harm. As the paper
notes, no problem taking strong action against those things, which
actually attack others' rights to access things and express themselves
or impose expression on people who don't want it. 

>In general, most of the world doesn't have a first amendment 
>and doesn't appear to want one - actually, many citizens 
>scream and ask their governments for more ex-ante censorship 
>of the Internet. How to make the 
>two visions coexist will be a challenge.

But this is true of the USA as well. If you had a vote on whether we
should have a First Amendment at all at any given moment, the outcome
would be uncertain. If the public were lathered up about something they
didn't like -- maybe it's communists in the 1950s or pornography or
whatever, there is always political dedmand for suppression. That's why
expression rights are enshrined in the constitution as a principle that
is not subject to the vagaries of majority vote. That is what "rights"
MEAN, Vittorio. 
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