[Chapter-delegates] China blocks Main Google web site

[Fred Baker]

I'm personally not sure it's the same question. In any event, it's a  
policy question, and as such it belongs on the policy list, doesn't it?

"Net Neutrality" is a profoundly useless term. It derives from a  
business debate that has become a regulatory debate in the US.  
Certain nameless ISPs advised certain large services that they might  
intentionally degrade their service if they didn't find a way to put  
dollars into said ISP's hands. The fundamental arguments debated have  
been whether an ISP is required to offer a service in which a  
consumer can access any legal site on the net without the ISP  
intentionally degrading that site's service (my personal position  
being that such a service should exist, but I'm not convinced  
regulation is required to make that happen as it happens to be the  
current normal case), and whether an ISP has a right to offer  
services and engineer high quality access to them (my personal  
position being that, yes, they have the right to offer services and  
to engineer their networks accordingly). In other words, an ISP has  
the right to engineer its networks to the benefit of its own services  
and its own customers, but customers should be able get to any legal  
site without being derailed, but said other sites have no reason to  
believe that the ISP will engineer the networks to their benefit as  
well.

The more I think about the business debate, the more I understand it  
in these terms. The services that were affected in fact buy service  
from a number of major ISPs. The complaints of the ISPs that raised  
the issue were in essence that they weren't recipients of money, or  
perhaps enough money, from those services. That says to me that the  
ISPs in question wanted either (a) for a system of settlements to be  
set up between ISPs such that the ISPs that the services bought  
service from passed some of the money on to them in return for access  
to eyeballs, or (b) for the services in question to also buy service  
directly from them.

In other words, I don't think it is actually about the network or  
about neutrality. I think it's about monetary flows and who pays who  
what.

Now, there exists a google.cn, a yahoo.com.cn, and so on as you are  
well aware. You will notice my carefully worded comment about "access  
to legal sites" above. In my opinion, it is within the regulatory  
purview of any country to declare a class of content unlawful. In  
Europe, the favorite class of content to declare unlawful is child  
pornography; in the US, that generalizes to pornography, in Arab  
states it includes pornography and also includes other things that  
don't conform to Shari'ah law, and in China it includes content that  
doesn't fit their guidelines, which is to say that they talk a lot  
about revolution but they don't want their own people actually  
getting interested in one. I don't agree with China's guidelines, and  
I consider their human rights record to be beyond deplorable, but I  
also tend to think that, whether I agree with their actions or not,  
they are a sovereign state and have as much right to make laws for  
their people as Fiji has to make laws about its people.

In any event, Google's interactions with China (and to varying  
degrees other states, especially Islamic states) aren't about  
monetary flows. They are about information flows, and the Great  
Firewall of China, and the implications of Shari'ah law.

I would suggest that we break these discussions into two threads.  
What do people think on the monetary flow issues, as I have set them  
forth, and what do people think about the information flow issues?  
What are the boundaries on the laws of a sovereign state? At what  
point is it the place of the global community to say of a specific  
country "your laws are wrong"?

On Jun 7, 2006, at 1:50 PM, Franck Martin wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5055170.stm
>
> Is it a Net Neutrality item too?
>
> Cheers
>
> -- 
> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
> Franck Martin
> franck at sopac.org
> "Toute connaissance est une réponse à une question"
> G. Bachelard
>
>
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