[governance] RE: What is Network Neutrality - was; a very grounded and divergent perspective on Net Neutrality

[Milton L Mueller]

Option 1. Telecoms are constrained from doing any ad-hoc and discriminatory interferences with traffic based on their business interests and arrangements with different providers of content and applications. However, this does not mean that they may not charge content providers differently for quality and speed for transmitting their content, as long as this special treatment is available to all for the same price and conditions.

Option 2. Telecoms are absolutely barred from charging content providers for any special treatment of their content, i.e. we do not have a tiered Internet, with different quality and speed of delivery of content as per different charges.

you have framed these options poorly.

Define better what you mean by different "quality and speed" in Option 1. Does it mean that a telecom can't sell me DSL because someone else can only afford dial up? If not, how is the effect of such economic differentiation any different than nondiscriminatory offerings of faster treatment?

Have you considered that end users might benefit from such anarragnement? it is clear you olny see the benefit for the suppliers.

Does Option 2 mean Akamai becomes an  illegal business? (do you know what Akamai does?) Does it mean that edge caching becomes illegal? if no, how is the effect different from what you purport to oppose?

Who gets classified as "telecoms"? (don't think the answer to that one is simpe, my friend. i can point you to decades of regulatory debate with millions or billions hanging on the answer).

please don't impose your own egalitarian fantasies on the internet. imposed equality has nothing to do with what the internet is, what it was, or what made it successful.


Milton Mueller
Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
XS4All Professor, Delft University of Technology
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Internet Governance Project:
http://internetgovernance.org<http://internetgovernance.org/>
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