Net-Neutrality or Net-Neutered?

Wed Dec 15 06:14:45 UTC 2010

Earlier this evening ISOC-NY hosted a talk "Nations and Networks" by
Milton Mueller
http://www.livestream.com/isocny/video?clipId=pla_3df8a3b8-e2ee-489d-82d2-d5fb7fc432ef

At one point, he said that he'd had conversations with government
insiders about their cracking of the whip on ICANN on matters like
.xxx etc. Their response had been that the USA's main worry is that,
unless they compromise with other governments on dns issues, the rest
of the world may decide to jettison the USA root altogether..  of
course, any messing with DNS smacks of hypocrisy after Hillary's rant
about freedom and openness in the wake of the Google-China frisson a
little while back.. I guess the argument would be that the freedom
only applies to "legal" sites.. she also suggested in the same speech
that anonymity was maybe a luxury that couldn't be afforded in a
responsible internet..
http://themorningsidepost.com/2010/01/live-from-dc-21st-century-statecraft/

However it seems increasingly difficult to find a government that
doesn't favor its sovereign right to maintain some kind of national
blacklist, whether based on dns or ip. To illustrate the occasional
foot in bucket effect of the latter he quoted the example of the
virgin killer wikimedia incident
http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~rlmw/iwf/Virgin_Killer.html  - as noted
there the proxy-based blocking system employed had the effect of
rendering the entire UK unable to edit wikipedia.

The Internet Society has issued a statement criticizing technical
efforts to suppress Wikileaks:
http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=1597

j

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com
 http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
  VP (Admin) - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org
---------------------------------------------------------------