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

[Vittorio Bertola]

Norbert Bollow ha scritto:
> Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
> 
>> And there is no principled objection to filtering spam because
>> almost all of it constitutes undesired messages which exploit the
>> ability to free ride on the Internet resources of others.
> 
> I disagree.
> 
> As long as the fundamental design of the email system is not fixed
> to make it possible to reliably avoid the problem of false positives
> in spam filtering, spam filtering is inherently problematic.
> 
> For example, with many spam filter systems, email messages containing
> Christian religious words have a much higher probability of being
> falsely classified as spam.  That is a violation of net neutrality
> with regard to freedom of religion.

I think that, in our collective discussion, we've abundantly shown that 
things are not black or white, and any attempt to design a single and 
simple principle is immediately subject to a flood of desirable exceptions.

Personally, I see it much easier to discriminate among "collectively 
approved" violations of the neutrality principle - established by law or 
by other open policy-making processes, under due process guarantees - 
and "private" violations, arbitrarily imposed by a single party or by a 
cartel.

Private violations are usually done for personal interest, much like all 
the business cases of non-neutrality on whose undesirability we all 
agree (BTW, Milton - there's a "right wing" reason for network 
neutrality too, which is promoting liberal market competition). But even 
when they're done "for the good", they usually lack checks and balances, 
so they are easily prone to capture, and they often reflect the 
operator's personal understanding of what needs to be filtered, rather 
than the socially agreed collective view.

Public violations, at least, should come from collective sentiments and 
through democratic processes. Of course you have issues with a possible 
"dictatorship of the majority", so we should err on the side of less 
filtering, than on the side of more filtering. In other words, they 
should be limited to the bare minimum that a society finds necessary - 
see for example article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights:

http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html#C.Art10

which represents the current compromise accepted in Europe.

Still, this doesn't solve the problem that these sentiments and 
compromises differ in different parts of the world. As I said, to me the 
real challenge is how to find a way to address the issue "glocally", 
allowing for flexibility while maintaining the uniqueness of the Internet.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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