Still discussing Net Neutrality

Even if the paper mentioned in the previous post is not ready yet for publication, we have already given a few presentations about the European perspective on the network neutrality debate.

First came the Workshop on Commons Theory for Young Scholars, organised jointly by the Max Planck Institute for research on collective goods in Bonn and by the Center for Internet and Society of Stanford University. At the Workshop, Network Neutrality has been the most discussed issue of application of Commons Theory (perhaps also thanks to the presence of Larry Lessig and Tim Wu) and the participants were very interested in the peculiarities that make the European context different from the American one.

The following venue was the Symposium Netneutraliteit in The Hague, of which a report (unfortunately only in Dutch) is available here (note the nice picture at the end of the page) and another one here. An interesting point was made on the connection between Net Neutrality and ISPs liability for the content they carry: when there is no 'neutrality' and ISPs exercise control on traffic, they incur in liability. Would ISPs really want this?

Further presentations were made at the College of Europe in Bruges at the Third ELEA Symposium (European Law and Economic Analysis) and then at the Dutch Competition Authority (NMA).

Lessons learned: the topic is very technical and requires an introduction; what the problem is with network neutrality may not be so clear, hence further introduction is needed; the presentation tends to be quite long; we should hurry up with finishing the paper.

A final note: even if I cannot post the paper yet, I can show a nice picture of the authors:

Network neutrality takes off at TILEC

The network neutrality debate is regaining momentum in the US after the FCC has decided to investigate the development of broadband Internet (pdf).
Since a couple of years already, big names of the Telecom and Cyber legal world have been kept busy with the issue whether network operators should be allowed to discriminate, one way or another, among packets of data. An interesting example of the debate is the blog-style echange of opinions between a supporter and an opponent of net neutrality regulation. A group of heavyweight economists has also intervened, by signing a brief position paper opposing regulation on the matter.

Should intelligence (hence control) shift from the edges of the network to its core? Who should build the infrastructure for next-generation Internet? What will the Internet of the future look like: more as a global public network or as a bunch of privately-owned ones more or less interconnected with each other?

Leaving aside those fundamental questions for a moment, we might want to consider also a few more down to earth issues: how to make sure that market power over a bottleneck facility does not lead to abuses? How should regulators intervene (if at all) to make sure that innovation is not stifled? How to prevent that access to valuable content or applications gets blocked because of commercial (or other) reasons? Is it possible to offer prioritised services to real-time applications (online games) without making access to non-real-time ones a painful experience?

After the TILEC report (pdf) of last year on the economics of net neutrality, and after Milton Mueller's visit in February, a TILEC trio (Pierre Larouche, Ilse vd Haar and myself) is currently working on the possible European answer to some of the questions above: whether net neutrality is an actual issue to begin with, whether and in what the discussion differs from the American one, what tools already exist to help tackling the identified problems.

In a short while, we should be able to post our paper here and on SSRN.