October 25, 2006NETWORK NEUTRALITYwith Mike Godwin and Drazen PanticThe term “Network Neutrality” (introduced by Columbia law professor Tim Wu) describes an Internet network that does not favor one application (for example Web) over another (such as online gaming or Voice over IP).Political debate (mostly in US) around network neutrality focuses on the role that government should take relative to possible interventions on the Net neutrality by big Internet access providers (ISPs). In essence network neutrality regulations proposed by number of Senators, and backed by big content providers like Google, aims to prevent ISPs from discriminatory behavior in favor of some type of Internet services or providers. On the other side, the opponents of current network neutrality and big ISPs are in favor of so called “Quality of Service enhancements for a fee”.The discussion will explain basic facts and protagonists in the current political debate around network neutrality. The issue will have broad social and cultural consequences, but since most of it deals with technological jargon, broader audiences are left out of the dissuasion, which is mostly driven and dominated by techno and media lobbyists and journalists. We will outline possible consequences if big ISPs are allowed to impose discriminatory behavior to the Internet services and traffic.SPEAKERS:Mike Godwin, intellectual property attorney and research fellow at Yale University, is perhaps best known on the Internet as the creator of Godwin’s Law. He was legal director of Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization concerned with intellectual property law. Godwin also served as the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joining the fledgling organization in 1990, and as a policy fellow for the Center for Democracy and Technology. Godwin has written articles about social and legal issues on the electronic frontier that have appeared in the Whole Earth Review, Quill, Index on Censorship, Internet World, WIRED & HotWired, and Playboy. From 1999 to 2001, Godwin served as a reporter on e-commerce and intellectual-property issues for American Lawyer Media, first as senior editor of E-Commerce Law Weekly, then as chief correspondent of IP Worldwide. He is a contributing editor at Reason.Drazen Pantic is co-director of Location One. A native of Belgrade, he is the founder of OpenNet, the Internet department of Radio B92 in Belgrade and Serbia’s first Internet service provider (est. 1995). For the use of new media technologies to counter political repression in former Yugoslavia, he was awarded the Pioneer Award of Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1999. He has established numerous public Internet access centers, including the cultural center CyberRex. He was also the Co-founder and Program Director of the Center for Advanced Media in Prague (C@MP), established in 1998 by the Open Society Institute. He has taught, lectured and published widely on the use of the Internet.