At high noon on Tuesday, September 28, James Boyle (Duke Law and The Public Domain author) will be discussing Network Neutrality on WUNC’s The State of Things. The crux of the discussion will be over whether all bits, servers, protocols etc are equal as Vint Cerf (inventor of the Internet Protocol) has said or whether carriers and ISPs should be able to offer tiered services giving higher priority to certain sites, protocols, services, etc as Bob Kahn (inventor of the Transmission Control Protocol) has held.
One way that the debate has broken is that services like Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc are pro-NN (in many cases) and ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable would like to sell you and the servers different rates of access at differing prices.
Rather than argue here — time for that is Tuesday — I’m posting a few resources:
- FCC puts off Net Neutrality decision til November (from eWeek Government IT, September 2, 2010) – This is why we’ve been invited to do this show.
- Six proposals from OpenInternet.gov (January, 2009)
- Stories from Mashable tagged NetNeutrality
- Andy Oram’s great wiki: Net Neutrality: Distinctions and Controversies
- Tim Wu’s long running Network Neutrality pages
- 2006 NPR story with Vint Cerf (pro) and Dave Farber (con) with good explanations for that point in time.
- A more recent (August 2010) NPR piece that does some position softening toward tiering at least in this story.
- Google Public Policy blog on Net Neutrality issues.
Please feel free to suggest additional (non-astroturf sources).
These from Fiona Morgan:
- Google, Verizon and the FCC: Inside the War Over the Internet’s Future in DailyFinance September 9, 2010.
- Open Technology Initiative of the New American Foundation – especially Response to Ofcom Consultation on “Traffic Management and ‘Net Neutrality: A Discussion Document” September 9, 2010 by James Losey
Any way to see it later online?
You can’t see it cuz it’s radio, but you can listen online here http://wunc.org/programs/tsot/ or listen on the radio in the evening tomorrow at 9 pm EDT