[governance] Proposed workshop text on global net neutrality

[Roland Perry]

In message <4F2D2352-9964-40E5-A4C4-7DB62C476A7C at post.harvard.edu>, at 
12:38:35 on Sun, 10 Apr 2011, David Allen 
<David_Allen_AB63 at post.harvard.edu> writes
>> In the current Internet model it's simply not possible for a content 
>>provider in UK to pay a consumer-eyeballs network in Pakistan to 
>>deliver its content preferentially (which includes paying not to 
>>restrict it).
>>
>> And when the "content provider" is the individual Internet citizen, 
>>wanting his blog to be transmitted everywhere, or wanting the files 
>>he's sharing by P2P to be received unhindered anywhere in the world, 
>>there's simply nothing approaching a mechanism for him to pay for that.
>
>Following that logic:  It becomes even more important - for 
>international receipt of material originated elsewhere - that 
>_national_ NN regimes are 'in the public interest.'

In the absence of infinite bandwidth within the country, and to the 
country, it may be in the "National Interest" to use what bandwidth you 
have to enable the majority of users to have a satisfactory experience.

In an attempt to illustrate what I mean, it's not unknown for email 
systems to put limits on the size of attachments, to perhaps 8MB, in 
order to share the system's resources equitably between users. There's 
an implication that either (a) 8MB is enough to express anything which 
should be circulated as an email or (b) that if you want to use email as 
a file-transfer protocol, there's a limit to the file size it's 
acceptable to attach.

Therefore email of that kind is not "network neutral" because of that 
arbitrary limit. And nor is there any money attached to each email to 
assist in building infrastructure for its delivery.

Similar arguments can be made for other protocols (such as HTTP, NNTP), 
but email is a good one to start with because many people will be 
familiar with this particular restriction, and indeed many who have been 
on the receiving end of bloated attachments may actually welcome it.
-- 
Roland Perry
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