I see no reasonable ratiionale to ban a protocol when traffic shaping can be achieved by protocol-insensitive means. Lack of competition in internet access persuades me that common carriage rules should be reinstantiated.
Are you saying that your service is private and therefore you can decide what I can and cannot send through it? V ----- Original Message ----- From: Brett Glass <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Vint Cerf; Edge, Ronald D <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: 'nnsquad@nnsquad.org' <nnsquad@nnsquad.org> Sent: Wed Mar 05 09:08:37 2008 Subject: Re: [ NNSquad ] Re: Civil Rights Groups Wants P2P Throttling to Preserve Rights (or something like that) At 08:54 AM 3/5/2008, Vint Cerf wrote: >these people don't seem to recognize that the interference of the >broadband providers is an abridgment of their ability to speak. >amazing. welcome to 1984, you have entered a time warp. Maybe this is >the Bizarro planet. Three very important points. Firstly, while the Constitution guarantees a right to free speech, it still allows government to regulate the "time, place, and manner" of speech. For example, you might be restricted from speaking in a way that violates others' rights (e.g. by a noise ordinance that prohibited you from driving through neighborhoods with a loudspeaker truck at 3 AM). Similarly, you might be restricted from using BitTorrent, which degrades others' service and thus harms THEIR ability to speak and also to receive speech. Secondly, the Constitution applies to government, not private parties. You have no Constitutional right, for example, to go into a privately owned theater, get up on the stage, and disrupt the performance, no matter what you have to say. Likewise, you do not have the right to abuse a privately owned network so as to speak. Thirdly, any speech which can be communicated via BitTorrent or other P2P protocols can also be communicated via other ones. If a speaker chooses to distribute speech exclusively via a protocol which is prohibited by most Internet users' contracts, he or she should expect that it won't reach many people. Anyone can post an ordinary Web site -- and should, if he or she wants the widest distribution for his or her speech. And that site will have the advantage of being able to be indexed by Google. ;-) --Brett Glass
