Telepocalypse

Net neutrality and the law

Reading today about the efforts to impose net neutrality, I was struck by the following thoughts.

Firstly, I see neutrality as working on two planes: what, and who. You can’t discriminate on what is being said on the network. (You can argue whether illegal behavior should be excluded from this definition — it’s a secondary issue.) This includes both technical restrictions (port and IP filters; redirection) and well as policy restrictions via contract. The who portion says you can’t selectively choose your customers. You have to take all comers. I would even include distinctions such as personal vs. business use as falling within these definitions. If the access proider wishes to price discriminate among market players, they would have to do it within the framework of neutrality. This could be through bandwidth caps, or connection speed — anything that is neutral between applications and people. Throttling of service, of worsening jitter after a certain bandwidth usage, would not be permitted: they discriminate against certain classes of application, like IP television or VoIP.

Now, with this definition, I propose that net neutrality can be achieved through market means. You just need to only offer common carrier protection against lawsuits to neutral network providers. Once you start to discriminate, you have to take responsibility for what rides over your pipes.

This should help to avoid the outrageous examples of free speech repression such as this, and encourage self-hosted self-expression. Indeed, an attempt to sue a net neutral ISP in an attempt to get end-user content removed should itself be punishable.

I’m sure this is not a wholly original thought, but a quick Google search doesn’t seem to find anyone else pushing it.