The US Pirate Party has proposed to adopt Net Neutrality as a core issue.
Faction or party?
If this proposal is accepted, the Pirate Party is no longer a party. It becomes a faction.
Why a faction? Because the "solution" abridges our rights to free speech. How's that? Doesn't it do quite the opposite? Doesn't it open up the internet to allow for more free speech? Isn't everyone agreed upon Net Neutrality and how important it is for the future of freedom on the internet?
Freedom of bits
There is another freedom, the freedom of bits. I may accept any bits I want. I may reject any bits I want. I may send out any bits I want. I may pass along any bits I want. This is our right as much as our right to speak freely. In fact, it is a special case of our right to free speech, our right to free discussion, our freedom to listen, and our freedom of the press. Ones and zeroes are the movable type of today's printing presses. And I may have a network which accepts those bits, rejects those bits, and passes those bits along however I choose, in principle.
Please don't misunderstand. I currently believe that an internet that fosters packet neutrality is destined for continued success. How do we handle bandwidth scarcity? I currently agree that paying for bandwidth on the client side is the best way to go. I'd avoid any ISP that would try, after promising too much bandwidth, to remedy its own mistakes by filtering packets based on whether some source had paid extra or not. It's ugly. I expect more from my ISP. That doesn't mean that I would forbid someone from following a different tack. It's important to experiment. I might change my mind. Perhaps there's a novel context down the road where charging the source of data, not the sink, for bandwidth near the sink makes sense. But if some faction comes in and says, "No, there is only one way of doing things, and you may not filter the bits coming through your network in any way," I disagree. If people want to fork the internet, let them fork it. As with an open-source effort, the possibility of forking, ideally rare, fosters a healthy dynamism. There's nothing wrong with defining criteria for a particular standard on this internet or that, but there's a world of difference between social agreement and government diktat.
Noblesse oblige
Lord Tim Berners-Lee says, "What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," and one ring to rule them all. Will meddlesome regulation lead to capture by the big players? I fear so. My hope lies in technology, decentralization, and competition, not control.
Where a pirate party might focus its attention is on the essentials. While we are distracted, squabbling about Net Neutrality, the government is off auctioning the Wimax spectrum to the big players. It's as if a new Louisiana Purchase has been made, and instead of encouraging millions to homestead the land and thus distributing the land equitably, the government is auctioning it off to the most wealthy and most connected, in huge state-size swathes, and establishing a few lords and ladies, with all the power imbalances that that entails. Let's discuss this as citizens. Why wasn't the spectrum divided up in a more decentralized fashion, perhaps with some element of homesteading? Why did the federal government have to be the sole seller? Do they have the power to do that? Why couldn't citizens themselves have sold it in a variety of ways, some of which might have been guided by a social conscience? Now perhaps we're stuck. And we're stuck, too, with some of the cartelization that may occur because of patent cross-licensing deals. This is some of the nitty-gritty a pirate party might focus on. If Wimax technology is driving the price down to near single digits (8 to 15 dollars) to connect a home in the last mile, let's make sure that there are no artificial barriers to entry put into place, as competition is poised for action. Patent monopoly grants, patent-based cartels, and spectrum homesteading, now there're some essential issues. After all, we pirates do have a history of marauding the radio spectrum :-) One caveat - the issue of property rights in spectrum is not trivial.
A sea of rights
Popular sovereignty is limited by rights, rights so vast we can't write them all down, which is why we have the Ninth Amendment. Government powers are islands in a sea of rights. Our rights are not islands in a sea of government powers. Where is it in the Constitution that we can play the music we like, or go to bed anytime we wish? It's right there in the 9th Amendment. So is my right of free bits. So is my right to freely network. As pirates, let's sail on our sea of rights.
When I first read the Statement of Principles (v. 3.0) of the Swedish Pirate Party, I felt hopeful. When the US Pirate Party website added advocacy of Net Neutrality, I turned disheartened. If this proposal is officially adopted tomorrow, the USPP risks becoming a pirate faction.
UPDATE: I'm not the only one to suggest that pirate parties explore the issue of spectrum rights. Over at Pirate Party International, Ole Husgaard of Denmark
writes,
I think we have two problems here that it makes sense for pirate parties to speak about.
The first problem is on the allocation of the radio spectrum. Back when we had a read-only culture (ie. running a radio station was expensive) this would make sense. Today a low- or medium-power radio transmitter is so inexpensive that everybody can run a radio station. But the radio spectrum is still administered to ensure that small personal radio stations are not allowed, so this keeps the read-only culture and stops the read-write culture from entering the radio spectrum. And worse: The allocation of the radio spectrum is probably being used to block certain political viewpoints in an undemocratic way.
The other problem is on the receiver side. You have probably all heard the stories about North Korea where you may own a radio receiver, but only if it is locked so that it can only receive the official national radio station. Something similar is about to happen in the west under the disguise of "copyright protection". This is part of the DRM problem, but worse as some forces want to make the sale and possession of non-DRM receiving equipment illegal. For example, see an old article on the "problems" with GNU radio (a universal software radio that can pick up any signal).
