On the road ...

Donc j'étais invité par le groupe des Verts au parlement de Bruxelles qui organisait une session sur "qui veut contrôler internet ?". Style très parlement EU, une centaines de personnes assis dans de confortables fauteuils en cuir, avec des traducteurs. Coté auditeurs des parlementaires, assistants, lobbyistes divers et variés. Coté invités des représentants des internautes et consommateurs, google, youtube, des petits opérateurs, ... tout sauf telco donc. J'étais invite en tant que secrétaire général de l'ISOC France.

Petit résumé en anglais :

Where : EU parliament, Brussels, G2, 1rst floor

When : 18th feb, 16h30-18h00

Org : Green party. Very nice meeting, 100 attendees, about 10 speakers, big room, nice chairs, translators, ... EU style ;-)

Speakers : Non telco people (except a very small french ISP) google/youtube, etc ... so everybody agreed more or less. http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/default/dok/270/270613.who_wants_to_control_the_internet@de.htm

Title : Who wants to control the internet ?: How the Medina report and the Telecom package can affect the internet. So the subject was not really about copyright, net neutrality expression rights but a bit of everything.

Networking : I met with all the french people there (APRIL, quadrature, FDN ...) but also with lobbyists from the telco industry (an former colleague from intel is their rep) but it's close to impossible to make him change his mind.

The introduction was : we from the parliament try to write a law about the spectrum, local regulation authorities, ... very simple things and we ended up with a war between copyrights holders and pirats, telcos, journalists, ... so we'd like to understand why and how this kind of regulation is impacting "internet control".

My talk : So trying to have a complementary approach (i was 1 out of 10 speakers), i said in french (this is the short version) :

• I'd rather talk about net neutrality than internet control. Control is hard to define and estimate, net neutrality much easier. Control may lead you to think that people have obscure goals, where in fact most of the time they don't.

• if you hear arguments about quality of service, fighting terrorists or pedopornography you will soon have a lot of problems with your rights pretty soon.
• Example : US army filtered the access to blogs for their soldiers during the war in irak. The official goal was QoS, the real goal was to stop them from publishing real life direct reports.
• But another example can be found in france nowadays with the journalists from liberation being arrested for comments published on the journal website. The goal is to put a huge pressure on website administrators, hosters, internet providers, ... to make them responsible for the content they carry itself.

• A non neutral network for political reasons is a danger, but most people are vigilant and react quickly. The real danger in the current context is a commercial one. For example the current trend is to merge internet/mobile operators with media creators. Such a big conglomerate will have an unified strategy to promote their content seen from their internet connection. When you have a mobile phone or a DSL line you are captive, you have no choice but to take the medias available from your connection.
• Example : BBC and CNN are now using a peer2peer protocol to legally broadcast their channel on internet. If an operator is blocking or slowing this family of protocols, to deliver a better Quality of Service he will be able to broadcast his channel instead, or the same channel but with a fee. You don't need to block it, just make it slower.

• So basically when you change the net neutrality you also change press rights, market and information balance. So be careful.

• During the short Q&A session, a mkt from telefonica asked why it was bad to differentiate offerings like cheap web only / medium web+email / expensive : all protocols I replied that the technical definition itself was a problem. What is email ? is it port 25 for old school email ? or port 80 for webmail ? and another port for a new email type ? Adding technical restriction would cause client confusion and market imbalance.

Photos a venir ...