[governance] Internet as a commons/ public good

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> 
> While specific pieces of equipment (e.g. routers, strands of fibre,
> etc) do not qualify as public goods, I would assert that the Internet
> epiphenomenon as a whole is neither rival in consumption nor (in the
> absence of bad changes e.g. to the legal framework) excludable.

[Milton L Mueller] Are you serious, or is this a sarcastic comment? Internet service is obviously excludable. Try not paying your ISP for three months. See how that "Internet epiphenomenon" works out for you. 

If you are confused about the nature of exclusion, you might try arguing that there should be a legal right to internet service, imposed on providers by the government. But that doesn't change the fact that exclusion is possible, and would occur normally without legal compulsion. Indeed, the need to legally compel providers to give the service to non-paying users proves that it IS excludable. If it were not, the nonpayers would get it anyway; you wouldn’t need a law. 

I can't believe we are really having this discussion.

> That said, that economic definition of public goods may not be the most
> relevant one here, in fact it had been proposed to explicitly reference
> a different conception of "public goods". (I'm not sure why the footnote

[Milton L Mueller] So we should make up our own little version of economics? Just ignore the way the rest of the world uses concepts and make them mean what we want? That sounds like a good way to get taken seriously. Not. 


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