[governance] Net neutrality: Definitions

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 01:21:54AM -0700, Karl Auerbach (karl at cavebear.com) wro

> You seem to feel that just because I may have a website or other
> service up on the net that you have unfettered rights to access it.
> That is not true.  I can limit or even revoke your access at any
> time without notice.  So can every other operators, except perhaps
> certain governmental ("public") operators.

Feelings aside and without judging which way it should be,
that is not true in many countries.
In particular, if you are doing business, you do *not*
have the right to discriminate arbitrarily against selected
clients in Finland or many (most?) other European countries
(probably EU level legislation, though I haven't checked).
Rather, you must have a valid reason (formally there's just
a list of invalid reasons, but it's so long that in practice
you must show a valid one).

> You can not demand that third party providers carry packets to and
> from your ISP.  Even less do you have standing to demand that those
> third party providers give your packets equal or premier treatment.

Actually, yes I can - ok, not premier but equal in some sense:
if they discriminate against my packets they must have a valid
reason in many countries, USA to the contrary.
(Although there are *some* restrictions even in the US against
some types of discrimination, like race- or gender-based,
if I'm not mistaken. Don't know if any such would apply here.)

> I get the sense that you are also attempting to equate the carriage
> of IP packets over privately owned links and routers in the net as
> if those were some sort of public place, along the lines of the
> cases in which private shopping malls were equated to public streets
> for purposes of things like gathering signatures on petitions.

Don't know about him, but the restrictions I mentioned are
rather considered "fair business practices".

> You can pound your keyboard against the cold iron of the perception
> of those who are spending the money that they own and thus control
> the assets they paid for.

There are lots of limitations on what you can do with your
property, especially if you want to do business with it.

> I suggest that absent some sort of expropriation that the best you
> could possibly achieve is some sort of non-discriminatory
> common-carriage regime to defined classes of service but that
> different classes of service would come at different prices.

Yes, one well-accepted reason for discrimination is money.

> That regime is not going to arise out of some local "common law"
> principle (particularly as most of the world isn't based on English
> "common law" at all).  It might arise at a national level via
> national legislation, but as we well know the net is international
> and supranational and that national law in that context is nothing
> more than "mere domestic law".

That is a very good point - even though we've seen various attempts
to enforce national jurisdiction on companies doing business
across borders, sometimes with success, and while technically
those only apply within national borders, they have some tendency
to seep across, via international agreements and even simply
because it's easier to stick to one set of procedures everywhere.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen
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