[governance] What is Network Neutrality

[Milton L Mueller]

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From: Sivasubramanian Muthusamy [mailto:isolatedn at gmail.com]
Wouldn't there be a balance if we seriously begin to be open to the concerns expressed by the business sector to SOME aspects of the 'discrimination' - a bad word, but may have to be permissible [in a certain context]. If a Virginia uses the Internet for business email and essential surfing, and Robert [co-panelist] is using it to download movies 24/7, what is wrong if Virginia is charged $10 and Robert a $100?

Siva, there is nothing wrong, indeed, a pricing regime that charges users more based on what bandwidth they actually use is scientifically known to be better for smaller users, who end up subsidizing bandwidth hogs under many flat-rate regimes. If you care about affordability you want price discrimination in this sense.

The main point I want to make is that charging more for more bandwidth use is NOT a net neutrality issue at all. This is unfortunately how the economic equalitarians have diverted and potentially destroyed the concept. NN has to do with anti-competitive or censorial discrimination among applications, services or content based on the origin or destination of the packets. Full stop.

We need to liberate the NN discussion from the efforts of economic equalitarians to appropriate the term in order to sell Maoist snake oil. Economic equalitarianism of the sort that says Virginia and Robert should get the same price for very different services and consumption rates is just plain dumb; it isn;t economically sustainable, and won't survive as a political or regulatory movement. So linking NN to this is a sure way to defeat it -- as the IGP paper warned over a year ago.


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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