There were two pieces that were released last week that caught my eye while I was travelling south of the border.
One was the support that the Liberal Party gave to the SaveOurNet crowd. Appearing on the Liberal Party blog, the support appears to rely on the flawed OECD statistics that we have talked about many times [such as here]. Our study, not mentioned at all by the Liberals, showed numerous studies that contradict the oft cited OECD report.
Here is what the Liberals said:
We agree with the position put forward by the Obama administration in the US. ISPs should not be able to discriminate and block or interfere in legitimate sites, users or applications. The Liberal Party, supports the principle of net neutrality and an open and competitive internet environment. We have called on the Conservatives to set clear principles and regulations with regards to net neutrality consistent with what is being proposed in the U.S.:
- ISPs cannot prevent access of users to lawful content, applications and devices
- ISPs must treat all lawful content, applications and services in a non-discriminatory manner; and
- ISPs must disclose all information with regards to network management.
These net neutrality principles must apply to all Internet networks, including wireless networks. [formatting corrected]
The Liberals may not be closely following what is actually happening in the US.
As Larry Downes of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society reported on CNet last week (and as we observed on Twitter in December), it appears that the Obama administration is moving away from a more ‘militant’ vision of government intervention set out by the FCC Chair last September.
The FCC is in the midst of gathering information from all sides of the issue before coming out with a final set of rules and policies. Hopefully, the Liberals will consult with other viewpoints in order to develop a more reasoned view. As we noted in December, the Obama administration’s FCC observed that “Policy changes require consideration of unintended consequences.”