[IRP] WE NEED YOU - crucial phase of drafting Charter of Human Rights and Principles on the Internet

[Lee W McKnight]

Max, Peter,

If I may try to gently wade into this discussion: I agree with Ian that talking a lot about a 'right' to network neutrality is a mistake best avoided.

However, the 'principle' of network neutrality is already enshrined in various docs, even if folks like Ian and I have been warning that any use of the the phrase is problematic, since it is a quagmire of ambiguity. 

However, if folks see a need to endorse the principle I can say that likely won't make things much worse.

The Google lobbyists who popularized the term must now be squirming, as AT&T scores political points of its own, having sued Google last week for alleged violations of network neutrality.

Anyway, my advice is be very very careful with those 2 words.

On the other hand, a wholesale endorsement of a right to an open Internet, as well as open Internet access, are defensible logically and politically; in my opinion. Even if they have their own ambiguities.

Lee
________________________________________
From: irp-bounces at lists.internetrightsandprinciples.org [irp-bounces at lists.internetrightsandprinciples.org] On Behalf Of Max Senges [maxsenges at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 04, 2009 11:13 AM
To: Ian Peter; irp; Internet Rights Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [IRP] WE NEED YOU - crucial phase of drafting Charter of Human     Rights and Principles on the Internet

Hi folks

Ian (who co-moderates the Internet Governance Caucus aka the mother of all IG mailing lists) makes some interesting points below. I have commented inline.

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 3:21 AM, Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com<mailto:ian.peter at ianpeter.com>> wrote:
Hi Max, nice to hear from you. A couple of things come to mind from you writing.

Firstly, we have chosen speakers for Sharm main sessions who will be willing to advance the rights issue. It will be good to strategise what else we might be able to do to advance the cause during the meeting.


One thing that comes to mind is that I am talking to avaaz.org<http://avaaz.org> I would like to run some sort of campaign and come with a long list of people who expressed that they care and are worried about their Human Rights on the internet.

Secondly, what else can we do during Sharm? I think we need to make our presence felt on this issue.

Anyway, to the text ? I?ll have a look later and make more comments but the first thing that hit me was the use of both net neutrality and end to end principles. I think we have to be very careful here.

Both end to end and net neutrality are retrofitted concepts that some people continue to defend but neither of which applies to the internet as is. I think we are better off dropping both phrases as both are contentious ? the internet is not end to end and never will be, and where net neutrality starts to imply no traffic shaping, we are getting into network management issues which we are best to avoid. The Norwegians have got it  right here ? I think we need to talk about the rights to access content and applications of choice, people understand that, and we avoid the technical debates and opposition. Similarly with end to end ? lets express what we are trying to achieve here and what the right is rather than imagining that somehow an internet without firewalls is suddenly going to happen or that?s the way it should be.  In other words, we have adopted catch phrases which don?t help our cause and create confusion ? lets get what we are trying to achieve here right!

Interesting point. I don't consider myself a technology expert on the infrastructure level. But I did discuss net neutrality on a panel at EuroDIG and my position is: Yes of course we need traffic management. If there is too many people and the lines are cogested some stuff (esp. real time apps like voice, etc.) need to be prioritized. But there are two important aspects: A) It needs to be reasonable - as in I want to know what and why: "your skype video has been disabled. Please continue with voice only, because the XYZ backbone in Chile is overloaded"
and B) the network must be open for innovation: As long as the data can be transported using standard infrastructure (protokols), the net infrastructure and the service providers should not have the possibility to build walled gardens and only allow selected services. (I thought we were about to overcome lock-in non-interoperable enviornments like compuserve and AOL)

my2cent
Max

(Robert, happy for you to pass this on to the drafters ? I?ll try to get to log in in a few days, but if that doesn?t happen it would be good to have these thoughts considered).

All the best,


Ian Peter