Search Results for: neutrality

On Monday, Mark Evans wrote a piece on Net Neutrality Ignorance. I am not sure I agree with his contention that

I think we could argue that our Telecom Act is already clear on points of discrimination and in carriers acting on the content of transmissions. More recently, as we have written before, the Telecom Policy Review panel examined the issues and came out with what we termed ” A Solomonic balance of interests.” The CRTC has examined the question and has said that it will deal with contraventions as they arise. Which they are doing.

It is hardly a ‘cautious Canadian approach’. We have existing legislation that covers much of the concern. We have had a review of the issue, with active public participation and had a report issued already. Are we really in limbo or do some folks just not like the current balance? I think we are ahead of the pack on this one, despite some people not being happy with the outcome – but duhhh… what else is new in Canadian telecom regulation?

Mark’s post refers to Save the ‘Net advocate Dave Weinberger, who writes about the potential loss of Innovation, Open Markets, Free Speech, Creativity and Democracy itself! Let’s look at one of his arguments:

Where does he get the idea that carriers “block users from being full-fledged creators”? Did all of the carriers in Dave’s area conspire together to refuse to sell him symmetric access? Or, does Dave really mean to say that he was too cheap unwilling to buy a business grade high speed internet access service with loads of upload and download speed. Apparently, Save the ‘Net folks wants symmetric access for $40 per month – or maybe they want government provided municipal service, so that they get other people to pay for their service.

Let me explore this paragraph a little further. We are supposed to believe that carriers are conspiring with the Hollywood studios to keep little guys from publishing content. This conspiracy presumably extends to the carriers coercing the studios to pay extra fees for their content to be carried, in exchange for the carriers prohibiting little folks from being full-fledged creators.

I guess all of the studios and carriers must be on side with this conspiracy – otherwise, I can’t wait to see Oliver Stone’s movie version.

I have been continuing my reading on the theme of Network Neutrality and came across the Washington, DC based Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Policy Studies. A long name for a consultancy – but they probably needed the extra words in order to distinguish themselves from a concert hall in Arizona – I’ll call them Phoenix for short.

Phoenix released an interesting report on Network Neutrality with a somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion that merits repeating here.

The arguments put forward by Phoenix are thoughtful and may be beyond the reach of many of the purveyors of hyperbolic rhetoric involved in this debate. But there appears to be some sound reasoning.

I have written before that I find much of the dialog from some of the participants to sound more like Marxist manifestos – “the internet belongs to the people” and “broadband monopolists”. Phoenix argues that forcing internet access providers to provide commoditized, vanilla service will serve as a disincentive to further market entry. And the net effect [excuse the pun] would be to exacerbate the limited availability of choice for consumers and content providers alike.

Jeff Pulver has started a campaign to Save the Internet. The objective, in the words of Jon Arnold:

Hmmm. Who are the people who have controlled the Internet so far? Hasn’t a free-market, business-oriented approach been the main driver of the innovation to date? Even the most anarchistic software developers appear to have been seduced by the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I can’t figure out what kind of Net Neutrality rules Jeff wants from the government. On one hand, he is looking for guarantees of wide open access – no interference in anyone’s bits. But use government interference to provide those guarantees. An internet world with no rules would mean that anyone can have anything, which sounds good on the surface. But that also means that someone could steal everything.

Think of the Internet as a public library. I suspect that in Jeff’s view, the doors never close and there would be no requirement for a library card. No one would even need to sign out a book – to maintain complete anonymity for the users. Users would return the books when they are done, because it is the right thing. Not because the operator of the library charged a fine for overdue books. And extra copies of the books in greatest demand would magically appear, so there was never a shortage of supply.

It is an interesting utopian view of the world and I hate to wake the dreamers – but there need to be reasonable limits. You want non-discriminatory access, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be fees associated with certain applications that have atypical requirements. In the context of the Shaw/Vonage dispute, it seems to me that, as long as Shaw isn’t purposely interfering with Vonage users’ bits, there is nothing wrong with offering a premium service that has quality of service guarantees in exchange for a fee.

For as long as I can remember, and I have been using the internet for more than 20 years, there have been Acceptable Use Policies to apply a semblance of order. Open, but not free. That is where I draw the line.

There is no such thing as free. Someone always pays the price. The advocates for open and free internet are generally looking for someone else to be paying their bills. If we want the internet to thrive, let market forces figure out the rules.

A report in the news today talks about Shanghai Telecom ordering network management systems from California-based Narus to “detect and mitigate rogue VoIP traffic on their network.”

Keep in mind that international voice services continue to be a source of foreign capital in many jurisdictions. In China, the government has allowed carriers to block traffic that competes with their own. Shanghai Telecom is acting within China’s regulatory environment.

While we may try to make this an issue of freedom of speech and network neutrality, I think the bigger issue is whether nations continue to have the ability to set and enforce their own laws in a world of IP.

There are many that believe that IP means that no force, whether government or corporate, should be permitted to interfere with their freedoms. Throw away intellectual property claims, make tolls illegal, protest against blocking of images – whether illegal or not.

Others have approached the internet with a view that the wild west can be tamed – that law and order can be extended to the new frontier.

Canada’s ISPs will knock down a web site hosted in Canada with merely offensive content, but will not take action to block websites hosted elsewhere with content found to be illegal by a Canadian court. We’ll be looking at the issue of Illegal Content on the Internet at The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit in June.

The Canadian Telecom Summit is more than just VoIP. It is where Canada’s telecom industry communicates.

There is a story in today’s Star that continues the discussion of Net Neutrality. Today’s entry cites Tim Berners-Lee, who is called “chief architect of the World Wide Web” and he is said to be ‘very concerned’ about talk from phone and cable companies about their desire to collect tolls from content suppliers.

A couple points come to mind. First off, Berners-Lee may have been the inventor of the Web, but to suggest that there is a ‘chief architect’ implies that there has been an orderly design to the Web and its evolution. I think that the power of the Web has been enhanced by its chaotic evolution. Innovation has been added without the need to work through an office of the Chief Architect.

Which brings me to the concern of charging tolls. My brother once told me that in his first litigation class in law school, the professor said that whenever people come into the office and say “it isn’t the money, its the principle of the thing” that a good lawyer will recognize that it really is about the money.

I just can’t get past the feeling that so many of the free access advocates are just plain cheap. They want someone else (like the government) to pay for their stuff. Whether it is stolen intellectual property like music or movies or software, or government funded fibre.

I wonder if these same people know that supermarkets collect fees for shelf space and companies pay money to have their products placed in movies and TV shows.