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

[Karl Auerbach]

Norbert Bollow wrote:

> 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*.

This is too much of a blanket statement.

There are those providers that chose to be entirely blind to the content 
of the packets they carry.  Often such carriers do so in order to take 
advantage of various legal protections afforded to those who exercise no 
editorial control over what is carried (and deciding what is spam and 
filtering it clearly is editorial control.)

And there are those providers that have contractual agreements with 
receiving end-users that contain permission to filter.

Put these two dimensions into a 2x2 matrix and we see that in one of the 
boxes there are providers that do exercise editorial control but have no 
contractual relationship with the receiver.  Those providers are, to my 
mind, providers that are a) perhaps running with thin immunity and b) 
are as violative of the end-to-end principle as is Verisign's SiteFinder 
because they usurp control over the communication from the end-users.

Spam filtering is, to my mind, OK only if it is done with the consent of 
the person to whom the spam is aimed (or his/her agent.)

I simply do not buy the argument that "providers have to protect their 
resources" as being adequate to trigger filtering.

Sure providers do need to protect their assets, but there needs to be a 
chain of permissions, originating ultimately with the receiving user in 
question.

A provider proper mode to induce users to give such permission is to 
raise the costs charged to those users who withhold permission and thus 
require the provider(s) to carry the garbage.  And core providers - the 
ones that sell packet carriage to other providers and not to end users - 
have a similar means of inducement - charging on the basis of traffic 
load, thus inducing their customers, i.e. the providers that actually do 
interact with users, to try to get those users to agree to filtering.

As usual, no heavy or new mechanism of internet governance is required - 
only simple contractual principles.

Network neutrality does not mean that providers must be blind.  However 
it does mean that removal of the blinders requires permission from the 
user's whose communication is being affected.  And it is natural and 
fair that those users' whose choices cause providers to bear additional 
costs should pay higher prices.

The one tricky part is how to constrain providers from this opportunity 
to charge extra $$ into an opportunity to create a bias in favor of 
their own products over the products of competitors.

		--karl--

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