p2p news / p2pnet: Jack Kapica of the Globe and Mail introduces the "net neutrality".

Bandwidth shaping is shaping up to be a bitter fight, promises Philippa Lawson of the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. "It’s nothing less than a battle for the future of the Internet."

I sent in the following letter to the editor which explains my views.

The debate over traffic shaping is like the debate over other technical measures. The question needs to be: who owns the thing that the technical measure is being applied to, and is the technical measure protecting the interests of the owner or protecting the interests of a third party.

The person sending information over the Internet should be able to determine, based on their own convictions, which information should get priority. I would prioritize my own voice traffic over email since email can withstand the delay. The ISP should be allowed to charge me more if I flag packets as needing to be delivered faster, but should not legally be allowed to set the policy. It should be the two endpoints in an Internet communication, and nobody else, that sets the policy for traffic shaping.

This is as it should be for technical measures and copyright. While a copyright holder should be allowed to encode their content in the format of their choice, they should not be allowed to apply technical measures to devices that the public owns. Existing competition policy demands they not be allowed to tie the enjoyment of their content to specific brands of devices where the manufacturer has applied a technical measure to the device. We own the devices, not the copyright holders or the manufacturers, and these devices should only have technical measures which obey the owners’ policy.

Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]

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Also See:
net neutrality – Jockeying on the Net fast lane, June 23, 2006

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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