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Wednesday, September 07, 2011

LibDem UK government junior partner: no net neutrality regulation yet


19 September, Dr Julian Huppert will present the digital economy policy paper for the junior coalition partner (with no ministers in the Culture/telecom Department):
"2.5.2 The Coalition Government has so far taken an ambiguous line on net neutrality. For example, the Minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative Industries has given a speech that was interpreted by one side as signalling open season on traffic management, and by the other as a reiteration of the importance of neutrality.
2.5.3 We do not consider it liberal to allow competition on the basis of existing service providers offering different packages based on traffic management that favours one company over another. Instead, it is better to provide a level playing field – where traffic flows at the same speed, whatever the content and whoever owns and operates the website.
2.5.4 In order to secure this level playing field, the government must be prepared to regulate. However, we do not at present consider it necessary to do so – merely to make it clear that privileging certain types of content or throttling download speeds on certain websites will lead inevitably to regulation."
Their faith in the market is liberal but....aspirational. Where's the evidence base?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To put it kindly, he sounds like a very ignorant when he talks about "one speed traffic", and how there are no toll roads in the UK.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/19/libdem_policy_proposal_pirate_friendly/

Maybe you could have a word.

Politics Matters said...

On the subject of net neutrality, Bob Gibson, Executive Director of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, recently said: “It’s a debate that is going on in the Congress, and it’s really: Is the Internet going to be something that everyone has free and open access to, or, is it going to be something that is sort of controlled? What we don’t need is a lot of government control in the businesses of the internet. I think what we need is more of what we have with National Public Radio, which is a really true and balanced set of reporting that unfortunately has become politicized. What we are seeing is a shift from “anything goes” on the Internet to a shift where major corporations are shaping the news outlets and buying up more and more of the news outlets and putting them under corporate control and one set of a small number of hands.... We need freeware, we need shareware, and we need open access. People need to be able to trust sources that they can find on the internet, rather than have them controlled in a small number of hands or by the government.” (Gibson appeared on the Charlottesville, VA, politics interview program Politics Matters with host and producer Jan Madeleine Paynter discussing journalism http://bit.ly/pm-gibson)