[governance] Outcome, Messages etc.

[Lee W McKnight]

Hi,

I promised Parminder a longer email on a suggested policy approach; I will jump in here.

First I agree that the IGC is free to define whatever it wants. What the IGF makes of it if anything is a separate issue.  But why exactly civil societyin particular should be fearful of IGF ever reaching a point at which some conclusions were drawn from some conversations or other actions there - never made a lot of sense to me.   As my past actions have shown; but let's leave that alone for now.

Instead let's - define the open Internet.

Which everyone claims to be for, so it should be an easy sell right.

(tactical aside: by slightly changing the subject from 'Network Neutrality' which cannot come unbound from the legal and regulatory precedents around the term, we have a clearer field of action. Meaning we can say open internet is really what network neutrality means, but without having to argue over specific debates like the FCC's dilemma of redefining an information service as a telecommunication service - by decree of 5 commissioners, after 50 years of regulatory proceedings and court cases on what is a telecom versus what is an information service (for reference: FCC Computer Inquiries I, II, III IV - and beyond!) (Last note: Good luck with that Chairman Genachowski, I'm sure you'll enjoy your time in court for the rest of your term in office, hanging with AT&T, and Verizon, and now your old pal Google sitting with their new pals.)

But on other hand if we are defining what 'open Internet' means, great, we can do that. And remember everyone claims to be in favor already, so what could be wrong with providing some clarity?

The fact that 'open Internet' crosses public and private networks and uses non-proprietary - and proprietary - protocols and technologies - isn't really the issue we all agree right. There is by now broad public interest in the functioning of this open Internet, no controversy there either.

So to amend Parminder's suggested approach: 

1st high-level policy principles

2nd a definition of open Internet

3rd service level expectations

4th technical specs

Simple right? ; )

1) POLICY PRINCIPLES
OPEN
UNIVERSAL
FLEXIBLE
NO DISCRIMINATION BETWEEN WIRELINE AND WIRELESS
Those are lifted  from the Caribbean Internet Governance Framework developed a few years back and approved at Ministerial level with CTU, ICANN, ITU, CARICOM, ECTEL etc participation- and inspired partially by our 'Gordian Knot' book calling for what we called at the time 'open communication infrastructure.'
TRANSPARENCY - probably should be there as well, we probably underplayed that way back then.

2) Open Internet is....ok here's the tricky part. Get this right in a few words and we can set an agenda.  I suggest something like 'The open Internet offers open, universal and flexible access without discrimination between wireline and wireless.'  Ok, we can make it shorter: 'The open Internet offers open, universal and flexible non-discriminatory access.'  

3) I defer to Karl to insert a suggested baseline set of service level parameters and 

4) technical specifications for open Internet access.  

So that's my suggested approach....or we can just become another player in the Net Neutrality debate, one unlikely to be heard over the noise coming out of Washington, Brussels, Google, Verizon, etc...again, good luck with that.

Lee
________________________________________
From: parminder [parminder at itforchange.net]
Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2010 9:41 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Outcome, Messages etc.

>NN may boil down to terms and provision
>of a basic (and affordable) internet access for the public. I'd
>encourage you and others to develop as a comprehensive list of
>requirements you may think of.

I agree, Mawaki.

Just to set the ball rolling, I would suggest two simple points.

Any telecom provider will provide the public Internet

1. at the same cost (or less) than any other IP based service provided by it

2. at the same (or better) QoS (quality of service) as any other IP service provided by it (though universally agreed differentiations of QoS between 'types' of applications - like video, voice etc may be allowed). VPNs can be exempt from this conditions.

Point 2, which I think will be more contested, is similar to the principal 3 of Norway's NN agreement which is enclosed.

Principle 3
Internet users are entitled to an Internet connection that is free of discrimination
with regard to type of application, service or content or based on sender or
receiver address.
 This means that there shall be no discrimination among individual data streams that
use the basic Internet service.
 But it does not mean that the principle precludes traffic management efforts on an
operator’s own network to block activities that harm the network, comply with orders
from the authorities, ensure the quality of service for specific applications that require
this, deal with special situations of temporary network overload or prioritise traffic on
an individual user’s connection according to the user’s wishes.

(ends)

In fact why should we, as the IGC, not adopt a simplified version of the Norway's NN agreement and present it at the IGF, expressing concern about the creeping encroachment on NN principle vis a vis the mobile Internet. Does anyone fnd anything wrong with the Norway's NN agreement.

Parminder




On Saturday 21 August 2010 06:25 PM, Mawaki Chango wrote:

Karl,

I think the suggestion in the second part of your message need to be
taken up. As you may remember, I myself have recently suggested in
another discussion thread that NN may boil down to terms and provision
of a basic (and affordable) internet access for the public. I'd
encourage you and others to develop as a comprehensive list of
requirements you may think of. However, I will urge you (in fact for
me, this is a prerequisite for the discussion to proceed in a
meaningful manner) to provide for each one of the technical
characteristics in technical terms and acronyms an explaining
formulation for a broader social consumption and discourse. That would
further enable the discussion you're calling for, and minimize the
otherwise justified criticism that these processes are taken over by
technical experts (when it's not by big corporations) at the expense
of democracy.

I see IGC as an autonomous body, not merely an appendix to IGF or
something. If we can have a substantive discussion and agree on the
basic level characteristics for a public internet service, nothing
prevents us from releasing a position paper/statement and promoting it
in this NN debate.

Mawaki


On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 4:38 AM, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com><mailto:karl at cavebear.com> wrote:



Another thing - We've talked a lot over the last few days about net
neutrality.

It is my sense that when the fur stops flying that we will be in a regime in
which there is some sort of non-discriminatory base carriage of packets and
tiers of higher grade (and higher cost) service.

But nobody has set down what those service levels might be, either in terms
of what a local, edge ISP would have to deliver, or what might be required
end-to-end across a sequence of providers.

For example, a base level service might have characteristics such as:

  - No discrimination on packet size, content, or IP address source or
destination.

  - Best effort, with routers limited to certain defined queue policies,
such as weighted or unweighted fair queueing, tail drop, various forms of
RED.

  - Delay not to exceed N milliseconds (on some sort of average) with jitter
not to exceed M milliseconds (with some defined algorithm to express
jitter).

 - Path MTU of at least 1500 bytes.

 etc etc.

A higher level (which might be included in the baseline) would further
constrain delay and/or jitter to better support VoIP.

There could be defined levels of non-neutrality, such as the preference for
DNS packets that I mentioned the other day.

If these service levels and definitions were created consumers (and larger
entities) could engage in real discussions with providers about what is
actually being provided.  And providers would understand what they need to
deliver.

The ITU has some work, G.1050, to characterize internet packet carriage
behaviour.  Although I have some problems with some of the burst algorithms
used in that specification, I believe that G.1050  perhaps could be used as
a baseline for discussion.

Nobody else in the constellation of internet governance actors is doing this
sort of thing - yet is seems to me that that kind of work would be rather
useful to users and providers.  Were the IGF to pick up the baton and run
with it the other "stakeholders" would have no grounds to complain and could
only try to catch up.

Moreover, I believe that by focusing for a while on more technical matters
that the emotional differences would be reduced it would be relatively easy
to make visible progress.

       --karl--



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