For much of the 20th century, the United States and most other nations found it useful to develop a notion of common carriage for communications and a status known as common carrier for the communications providers themselves.

A common carrier had to provide a neutral communications platform.  Calls were completed between parties regardless of who they were, what was talked about, the language used, and so on. As long as each party paid its bills on time, it was treated by the carrier as a legitimate and equal user of the network.

On the Internet, where communications travel as packets of data in accord with a universal protocol, every carrier and service provider is, almost by definition, a common carrier. As a network of networks, the very architecture of the Internet demands that packets be routed regardless of who the initiator and recipient of the communications are, whether the communication constitutes information or entertainment, the language used, and so on.

Fears have arisen recently that the nature of the Internet will soon change. Legislation has been proposed that attempts to protect the Internet, and to, it is thought, encroach on it. Generally, such thinking has exhibited a confusion about what the Internet is and how information, ideas, and entertainment are conveyed across it. By and large, all legislative proposals to date have suffered from this confusion, either trying to protect what needs no protection, or trying to alter, by law, the technical standards and protocols by which the Internet operates.

We propose, in their place, a very modest law that would acknowledge some fundamental abstract principles of internetworking as it is practiced today, and place the responsibility for their continued development in the hands of the computer and communications scientists and engineers who have, over the last forty years, designed the most efficient communications platform the world has ever seen.

Contact:

Seth Johnson
(212) 543-4266
seth.p.johnson@gmail.com