[governance] Re: What is Network Neutrality

[Ralf Bendrath]

Meryem Marzouki schrieb:

>> http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-do-we-mean-by-net-neutrality.html
>>
(...)
> In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to
> use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or
> content. 
I think this is the key point: "competing". This would protect users from
vertical integration issues and market-power in cases where a broadband
carrier is also offering e.g. his own content or voip services.

Good. Agree.

But:
> Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers
> who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be
> allowed to use their market power to control activity online. Today, the
> neutrality of the Internet is at stake as the broadband carriers want
> Congress's permission to determine what content gets to you first and
> fastest. Put simply, this would fundamentally alter the openness of the
> Internet."

This is at least misleading, because the telephone analogy does not hold
here. Once a phone circuit is established, it is reserved for your call,
while on the internet, you have congestion issues. So if my broadband
carrier does QoS and sends my VoIP or streaming video over a faster pipe
than my bittorrent or ftp traffic, I don't see it as a problem, and
actually, a lot of networks do it.

The key here is that such QoS (which always is /discrimination/ of some
packets for the sake of speeding up others) should /at most/ be done on
the basis of the /protocol/, but not in any case on the basis of the
traffic source[1] or the actual content.

Best, Ralf

[1] Even here, it's a bit more tricky: If my ISP has different peering or
interconnection agreements with different sources, the traffic coming from
 different autonomous systems may be discriminated as a result. I guess
the point is that they should not use their market power to enter into
/arbitrary/ interconnection agreements because some other network provider
also offers competing content etc. Again, the whole point is "competing",
which leads to NN as non-exclusionary business deals.
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance