[governance] The Gilder Friday Letter #Net Neutrality

[parminder]

On Saturday 14 September 2013 08:38 PM, Adam Peake wrote:
> In the Verizon case in the U.S. I've heard that the judges are leaning towards allowing telecom and cable broadband providers to charge OTT players for prioritized network services, but will leave some other parts of the FCC's Open Internet rules intact.  Meanwhile in Europe, Commission vice president Neelie Kroes last week released proposals for major telecom reform aiming to create a single telecom market which include network neutrality provisions that would allow telcos to do much the same: they'd be able to differentiate their offers perhaps by speed and compete on enhanced quality of service.  Thou Kroes is also proposing to prevent throttling of traffic and blocking of some apps (Skype, WhatsApp etc etc).
>   
> Press release for the EC proposals <http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-828_en.htm>, good summary <http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-779_en.htm>
>   
> If both the U.S. and Europe were to go this way, and not certain in either case, then guess it might become a bit of a norm for other country's to allow the same.


Which is a huge problem of global (non) governance of the Internet - 
that the mighty are able to dictate the architectural framework of the 
Internet by sheer market/economic, and, also often, political dominance. 
Civil society has not been able to offer any response to this patently 
anti democratic situation. Neither has the much touted multistakeholder 
model any response to this situation.

A bit strange that even after 7 editions of the IGF, while Bali IGF will 
be full of sessions on multistakeholderism, all these years we could not 
get one main session on net neutrality (NN) - which to me is almost 
'the' paradigmatic public policy issue of IG. In fact, there were really 
a lot of proposals to get a main session on NN this year but , at the 
Paris MAG consultations, I had the feeling that these proposals were 
actively discouraged if not sabotaged by the powers that be.... Perhaps 
MAG members can help us understand why we could not get a main session 
on NN, when all kinds of sessions with vague titles made the grade...

This gives grist to the propositions that the exclusive focus on 
procedural issues at the IGF just helps build a smokescreen preventing 
the needed global discussions on real public policy issues.

Very unfortunate that while , as per above Adam's email, the die seems 
to have been cast in terms of a non NN Internet, all these years IGC has 
still not being able to get over arguing on things like - the meaning of 
NN is not clear.... I consider it as a major failure of IGC that we 
could do nothing, much less provide leadership, on this all crucial IG 
issue.....

parminder


>   
> Adam


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