Net Neutrality and copyright

I've been working steadily for quite a while on a paper comparing the IP battles to the network neutrality battle. As we've all discovered, these are very hard issues. There aren't clear answers, although the social benefits of the neutral-substrate internet (like the social benefits of the public domain) seem to be ignored by the people claiming the need for protection of their property rights.

It's finally becoming clear to me that the social argument is the only real argument. [...]

The key, though, is that neutrality (or unbundling, my preferred way of doing this) will be better for society as a whole. Awarding very strong property rights to the network providers, like awarding very strong property rights to content companies, won't be as beneficial to society as tempering those rights somewhat. We've done this in the IP context with things like fair use and "limited times" for copyright and patent protection. Indeed, the whole point of IP law is to encourage the creation of useful things for society; benefiting IP owners is a means towards that end.

Susan's underlying analogy has some promise, in that in both cases there are monopolies granted that create a kind of property right over a public good, or at least one with positive externalities. A while back I tried out multiple alternative arguments against copyright extension and DRM. Lets see how the copyright ones fit the net neutrality frame. These are the copyright arguments:

Liberal collectivist

The shared culture of society should belong to the people together, not to faceless corporations.

Libertarian

Our ability to express ourselves freely should not be constrained by a state-granted monopoly.

Liberal Economist

As non-rivalrous goods with a vanishingly small marginal cost of reproduction, cultural goods reach maximum utility by being freely replicable.

Conservative

Creating property rights in goods that can be duplicated at will is inflationary, and undermines the value of real physical property that is the bedrock of a stable society.

Translating them into net neutrality we get:

Liberal collectivist

The infrastructure society needs to communicate should be controlled by the people together, not to faceless corporations.

Libertarian

Our ability to send data to each other freely should not be constrained by a state-granted monopoly.

Liberal Economist

The value of packets transferred is only clear to the originator and sender, not to the intermediary carrying them, so maximum utility is realised by enabling the endpoints to set values, not the network operator.

Conservative

Giving network operators the power to decide whose packets get priority undermines the traditional balance between family, government and other authorities that keeps society stable.

Doing this did make it clear that the argument is weaker in pure net neutrality terms. Emphasising the monopoly rights over public goods (cable-laying and radio spectrum rights) that they have used to build the networks may be better in this kind of argument.

Technorati Tags: copyright, Digital Commonwealth, digital rights, economics, meme, net neutrality, politics