Net Neutrality.

I thought I'd provide a dump for my e-mails to Ed Vaizey. His proposition to do away with Net Neutrality in the UK angered me as well as many people around the country and I felt compelled to email him.

I got a response after my initial questions which led me to hope for a discussion on the matter but he never replied to my response. Either he felt argued into a corner or the sheer weight of people pissed off at him has him cowering under a desk in Whitehall, sucking his thumb and wanking into a Union Jack.

Why am I putting my e-mails here? Because I think I'm super awesome? Well we all have an ego,but I put my feelings about net neutrality quite succinctly into my e-mails and figured I may as well post them up to see how other people felt.

So what are your thoughts?

"

Me:

"Just a few points.

"good for business,"

1: It's good for large established businesses as they can afford to pay for priority service. Not for any web- entrepreneurs.

"good for the economy"

2: The most accessible and widespread venue for new businesses is the internet. If you stack it against the smaller, startup companies you're effectively killing off the generation of new companies and ideas in the UK.

"good for people"

3: Apart from the aforementioned entrepreneurs losing out, the general public will be funneled through an effectively smaller internet, with a choice between well served large websites or struggling through smaller potentially more interesting sites. How exactly is this good for them? They're losing out on the service they already get.

"Content and service providers should have the ability to innovate and, most importantly, to reach users,"

4: This is the complete opposite of what should be done to promote innovation.

No I don't expect a response. But this really is just silly.

-Simon."

Ed:

"Have you read the whole speech?

Ed Vaizey MP
Minister for Culture
Member of Parliament for Wantage & Didcot

Sent from my iPhone"

Me:

"Ed

The only answers to my questions in the speech are promises that the management would be regulated. That the companies wouldn't be allowed to degrade service too much and that everything they do would be transparent.

This is great on paper of course but in practice such regulation is not guaranteed to be utterly water-tight. Who's to say that companies wont push it as far as they can? Slowly pushing the boundaries back? Who's definition of fair use will be employed? Will it be the same as mine? Will the regulating body be utterly infallible? Even if the transparency works and I can see exactly what my choices are who's to say there will be an option which suits me?

The only water tight method of ensuring the system stays fair is to maintain net neutrality, that way the discussion of fair use is binary, either it is or it isn't.

"We should tread very carefully. In order for the

Internet to continue as the open, innovative force for good

that it has been over the past 20 years"



How do you propose to maintain the internets openness by reducing how open it is? Even if your proposed regulations work perfectly the fact remains that even the slightest management of service in the suggested way reduces how open it is. Open internet is the definition of net neutrality.



Which leads me onto my final point,



"People don’t even agree what is

meant by net neutrality. It is a term which means different

things to different people. "



This trope has been doing the rounds amongst politicians and business people alike for a long time now. Net Neutrality is clearly defined. Besides which it's name leaves little to interpretation, Net Neutrality, neutrality of the net.



Here is the original paper on net neutrality by Tim Wu, the man who coined the term "Net Neutrality:"



http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863
"