[governance] The Gilder Friday Letter #Net Neutrality

[Norbert Bollow]

Parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:

> > 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...

+1

> the die seems to have been cast in terms of a non NN Internet

As correctly described in the text which Adam forwarded, the outcome is
by no means certain neither in the EU nor in the US.

I've been following the EU developments a bit: The situation is
essentially that (reportedly after talking a lot with industry
lobbyists, and pretty much not at all with civil society) Kroes is now
pushing a legislative proposal that would give the EU a net neutrality
directive with actual rules that are so weak that having no directive
at all would be far better.

That has significant weight, and it is very bad news of course,
considering in particular that Kroes in fact used to understand the
topic well enough that not long ago she was arguing for a much more
reasonable kind of net neutrality rules.

On the other hand, the term of office of Kroes is going to end soon,
and there is going to be a parliamentary process during which it is
quite realistically possible for a proposed directive to be
significantly improved, and where civil society has reasonably good
opportunities to influence what is going to happen.

IMO, as international civil society in the area of Internet governance,
we urgently needs to get our act together and draft a good set of
guidelines on net neutrality that make sense from an international
public interest perspective.

Greetings,
Norbert

-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t