The Decoupling of Net Neutrality and Democracy Concerns

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Des Freedman, who shifts our focus to Net neutrality; he suggests that debates over Net neutrality have become overly legalistic and abstract, and discussions of democracy have largely disappeared from them. The overall debate is now about openness: an open Internet. The principles which underlie arguments for an open Internet are now about consumer entitlements rather than democracy.

Net neutrality has now been framed around competition; where competition thrives, Net neutrality is said not to be an issue, and so the issue has been marginalised by other concerns. Net neutrality is now about discrimination and transparency: non-discrimination in terms of what content is transmitted how, and at what price, and transparency in terms of network management. In Britain, Ofcom has been actively framing this debate in that way.

Why has democracy disappeared in this way? Perhaps because the debate is too technical; perhaps because it has been captured by lobbyists; perhaps because ‘democracy’ is difficult to quantify and enshrine in policy documents. At any rate, there clearly is a citizenship interest in this debate, and the blockages and opacity at the heart of online traffic management need to be challenged. This also means challenging the rhetoric of openness and transparency, which is mobilised all too often to legitimise instrumental approaches.