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

[Vittorio Bertola]

Dan Krimm ha scritto:
> Again, I return to the deep roots of common carriage in Anglo-American
> common law (note: peculiarly enough, most individual states in the US have
> strong components of legal precedent beyond the bounds of federal law that
> still appeal explicitly to English Common Law, except for Louisiana which
> is derived from French/Norman law).  Modern democratic governance emerged
> for the first time in the 1700s during the Enlightenment, and so one can
> reasonably claim that common carriage has been a founding principle of
> modern democratic systems from the beginning.  IMHO, it ought to remain so.

Quickly - because it's past midnight and I'm leaving tomorrow early.

I think that the case for network neutrality is there, it has so many 
clear reasons in its favour, it should be possible to get it recognized 
and formalized and push countries to adopt it in national regulations, 
perhaps this could be a nice achievement for the IGF.

I am just afraid of the idea of collapsing the battle for network 
neutrality with the battle for a sort of "global online first amendment" 
that says that nothing should be censored ever. It's not democracy 
versus authoritarianism; there are several very democratic countries 
(most of Europe, to bring my perspective) that think that, for one or 
another reason, some forms of speech must be prohibited. Actually, many 
think that prohibiting such speech is necessary to protect democracy - 
and I can tell you, when you have had grandmothers that told you how 
blowing on the fire led Europe to Hitler, Mussolini and the holocaust, 
the perspective on free speech changes significantly. Just 15 years ago, 
a few hundred kilometers from my home, people were practicing ethnic 
cleansing on mass scale. Inflammatory speech had a key part in this.

Of course saying that there are words you can't pronounce isn't easy, is 
prone to anti-democratic misuse, it has all sorts of problems. But I 
don't think that an Internet where you are free to advocate for the 
reconstitution of the Nazi party, exploiting cross-boundary 
communications to bypass laws where that's illegal, would be a good 
prospect for our world. Maybe the only way to address that is by 
national (or at least regional) boundaries where content is filtered 
out, maybe there is no way to address it and we'll have to live with the 
consequences, who knows - I am pointing out the issue and the widespread 
sensitivities to it, I have no solution.

But exactly for that reason, mixing network neutrality with a much more 
controversial and complex issue will just break the front. So I wanted 
to be sure that you're not trying to do that.

Regards,
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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