Academics for Net Neutrality

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

Andrea Foster's article The Fight for a Toll-Free Internet, 
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 2006, might be of interest 
to Liblicense readers. 
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i35/35a03901.htm

Thanks to Peter Suber for the tip, and a useful excerpt for 
non-subscribers on Open Access News, at: http://tinyurl.com/nuqz9

As Andrea Foster explains, the internet opens up tremendous 
potential for education, particularly for distance education. 
However, without net neutrality, educational institutions may 
face choices between inadequate service, and paying a premimum 
for acceptable service. This is already happening, for example in 
Alaska where educators whose videoconferencing service was below 
par were told to pay more for acceptable service.

As Peter Suber points out, this issue has implications for open 
access.

However, the implications are much broader than open access - 
this issue has profound implications for education, library and 
publishing services in general.

Whether the resources our users are pointing to are 
subscription-based or open access, without net neutrality we 
could begin to see deterioration in service as more and more 
commercial applications beging to use the internet - unless we 
are willing to pay a premium for good service.

Picture the implications of sharing current bandwidth with 
internet-based television and phone services, not to mention 
streaming movies into homes. Scholarship and education, once the 
core of the backbone of the internet, could be shunted off to the 
slow lane. Or, we could pay a premium - possibly a hefty premium, 
considering these commercial competitors - for good service.

The implications are either a future of poor service, or an 
additional cost factor, or some combination of the two (e.g., 
paying a bit more for mediocre service, rather than paying lots 
more for premium service).

thoughts?

Heather G. Morrison
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com