Reading through Net neutrality issue, a question comes to my mind.
Why now?
Why today we see the freedom of the net being directly attacked?
I refer to two issues:
- copyright infringement. Now government are becoming serious about applying copyright rules. Up to now, they closed an eye.
- net neutrality. Government in EU are quite open to having telecom to charge service providers for the transport service through the so-called tiered access, for example making youtube pay for a guaranteed level of service
Why this coincidence in time?
Well for me it’s clear. Government kept a blind eye on copyright infringement because they wanted to promote broadband. And the main driver of broadband adoption has been downloading music for free.
Now that broadband is widespread, they can “open the eye” and act upon it.
Actually, for all our work on proactive policies to promote ICT take-up, the real policy lever has been: don’t prosecute copyright infringement.
I am actually not sure this is a bad choice. It could have been beneficial for the society and the economy.
Yet a questions come to mind: if this was the most effective choice, how could it be done in a fully trasnparent way? Well it couldn’t. Does this prove trasnparency unfeasable? Certainly not, but sheds light on what we can and might achieve as gov20 evangelists.
Spot on. Real life policy is a messy business, very far from the story you are told in Economics graduate school of principal-agent models: rational voters elect representatives that make laws on their behalf, and law enforcement is straightforward. The reality is more like trial and error, institutional hacks and huge information asymmetry, in which technocrats wild considerable influence.
An even better example is the history of the Internet itself: a bunch of Californian hippies used the federal cold war budget to design a radically democratic medium. I don’t think the top Feds signing rhe cheques saw it coming.
great alberto, that is exactly institutional hack. but can government hack? do we want hacker policy makers? somehow, mr B is certainly a institutional hacker
in any case, today I saw this which confirmed this feeling: http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2010/09/30/news/pirateria_francia_hadopi-7583145/?ref=HRER2-1
[...] I came out with a less ideological vision. It has confirmed my previous impression that the decision not to enforce copyright was largely an industrial policy decision in favour of [...]