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

[Norbert Bollow]

Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> wrote:

> Norbert Bollow [10/11/07 14:15 +0100]:
> >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.
> 
> Please dont drag in net neutrality into contexts where it doesnt exist.
> There are no common carrier obligations for email traffic.

The statement "There are no common carrier obligations for email
traffic" sounds like a pretty much indefensible position to me.  Among
all the internet users whose email is in some way subject to automated
spam-filtering, almost everyone is *not* making all relevant decisions
*themselves*.

If those decisions which people don't make themselves are made in such
a way that some categories of internet users are discriminated against
on grounds that are irrelevant to any legitimate definition of spam,
that is IMO a violation of an important principle, which I'm referring
to as an aspect of "net neutrality", for want of a better
widely-understood term.

Economically, it's the exact same kind of issue as with phone calls
and phone companies.  As an end user of the telephony system, I have
every right to decide that I don't want to talk with party X, and if
party X calls me anyway, I have every right to refuse to talk with
them.  However, the phone company does not have the right to make
that decision for their customers.

I don't object to email filtering in ways which are guaranteed to only
affect forged email (as determined e.g. by the DomainKeys system) and
unsolicited bulk email, but as soon as there is a risk of the filters
affecting human-to-human correspondece or solicited bulk email, things
are getting problematic, and even a low overall false positives rate
is IMO unacceptable if there is a pattern in how the false positives
are distributed and the pattern violates "net neutrality" principles.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org
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