[Chapter-delegates] Competition, Net Neutrality and Transparency

[Joly MacFie]

I note Frederic Donck's recent comments to the EU
http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/?p=2541
<http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/?p=2541>

“We believe that competition should facilitate an innovative digital
> economy. But that might not be enough,” Mr Donck said.

 “While there are many criteria for defining real and effective competition,
> among the most important is transparency in service offerings so that users
> have a choice of Internet service providers and are able to make their
> choices based on informed decisions"



Apropos of this, I had an interesting conversation with Barbara van Stanwyck
subsequent to her presentation at NYU Law School last Wednesday. (Barbara's
theme was that blocking, discrimination, tiered access etc can be, but only
is, desirable if it is at the choice of the user not the provider.)

I mentioned that there are plenty of ISOC-NY members who consider net
neutrality to be a competition issue that would be assuaged if not solved by
open access at "level zero" i.e. the physical layer, or at least unbundling.

Barbara then surprised me by saying that her research actually revealed the
opposite to be true - that in countries such as the UK and Germany where
unbundling is statutory there is much more deep packet inspection,
applicatiion based throttling etc going on there than in the duopolist last
mile USA - due to the competition pressure to lower prices and thus optimize
value from every bit of throughput.

Comments? Veni?

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