scholarly journals Economic Democracy and the Quest of Net Neutrality in Indonesia

Lentera Hukum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 387
Author(s):  
Arasy Pradana A. Azis

Net neutrality has played critical issues in internet-based businesses, as it may stop Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from discriminating against certain legal internet contents, platforms, or services. This study argued that net neutrality has a strong relationship with economic democracy as the constitutional basis of the Indonesian economy. This study examined net neutrality and considered its possible adoption in Indonesia under economic democracy by justifying economic democracy required the state to build an inclusive economy as per political economy theory. It used a socio-legal method through an interdisciplinary study of law and political economy with conceptual and comparative approaches. The study showed that the idea of the internet as a level playing field was founding net neutrality. For instance, in the United States and across different Global South countries, net neutrality relied on three orders of no blocking, no throttling, and no paid prioritization, which provided equal access for everyone to create their opportunities. At this point, economic democracy and net neutrality made their cross-cut. Like net neutrality, a discriminatory action against a content provider violated economic democracy, where policy-makers formulated economic policies to enable a level playing field for economic actors. Minimum barriers to entering the market might create such a level playing field. Without net neutrality, ISPs could carry out arbitrary actions and abuse of power for business interests. This study concluded that the adoption of net neutrality into formal regulation created a positive climate of innovation in the digital business ecosystem in Indonesia. KEYWORDS: Economic Democracy, Net Neutrality, Digital Economy.

Author(s):  
Maria Löblich

Internet neutrality—usually net(work) neutrality—encompasses the idea that all data packets that circulate on the Internet should be treated equally, without discriminating between users, types of content, platforms, sites, applications, equipment, or modes of communication. The debate about this normative principle revolves around the Internet as a set of distribution channels and how and by whom these channels can be used to control communication. The controversy was spurred by advancements in technology, the increased usage of bandwidth-intensive services, and changing economic interests of Internet service providers. Internet service providers are not only important technical but also central economic actors in the management of the Internet’s architecture. They seek to increase revenue, to recover sizable infrastructure upgrades, and expand their business model. This has consequences for the net neutrality principle, for individual users and corporate content providers. In the case of Internet service providers becoming content providers themselves, net neutrality proponents fear that providers may exclude competitor content, distribute it poorly and more slowly, and require competitors to pay for using high-speed networks. Net neutrality is not only a debate on infrastructure business models that is carried out in economic expert circles. On the contrary, and despite its technical character, it has become an issue in the public debate and an issue that is framed not only in economic but also in political and social terms. The main dividing line in the debate is whether net neutrality regulation is necessary or not and what scope net neutrality obligations should have. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States passed new net neutrality rules in 2015 and strengthened its legal underpinning regarding the regulation of Internet service providers (ISPs). With the Telecoms Single Market Regulation, for the first time there will be a European Union–wide legislation for net neutrality, but not recent dilution of requirements. From a communication studies perspective, Internet neutrality is an issue because it relates to a number of topics addressed in communication research, including communication rights, diversity of media ownership, media distribution, user control, and consumer protection. The connection between legal and economic bodies of research, dominating net neutrality literature, and communication studies is largely underexplored. The study of net neutrality would benefit from such a linkage.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 151-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Jamison

Abstract The US debate about net neutrality has been unusually contentious for a telecommunications regulatory issue, most recently culminating in a 2017 reversal of a 2015 decision to apply traditional telephone regulations, written for a monopoly era, to internet service providers. This article reviews this history, beginning 1956 when the government first imposed an industry boundary between transmission of information on the one hand, and the creation and processing of information on the other. This regulatory legacy remains embedded in US law and has led to some of the muddle. This article also examines the academic literature relating to net neutrality. On this, the answers found in the literature vary depending on assumptions made about technology, industry structure, and industry practices. When the answer to the question of whether regulations are beneficial is “it depends,” and the scenarios that give different answers are realistic, it would seem that the policy approach should favor applying competition and consumer protection laws that address problems when they occur rather than ex ante regulations, which would be certain to harm at least in some situations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Zoltán Szűts ◽  
Jinil Yoo

Tanulmányunk témája a netsemlegesség. Először magát a fogalmat definiáljuk többféle módon, majd a netsemlegességgel kapcsolatos törvényhozói, internet- és tartalomszolgáltatói, valamint felhasználói kihívásokat, problémákat és válaszokat mutatjuk be. Számos szerző szerint az internet legnagyobb, immár tradicionális értéke a nyíltság, sokszínűség, tartalomgazdagság, tértől és időtől független társadalmi és perszonális kommunikációba való szabad belépés és a szabad verseny lehetősége. A netsemlegesség mellett és ellen felhozott érvek bemutatását is ezek a szempontok alapján tesszük. Kiemelt szerepet kap a netsemlegesség megsértésének kategorizálása is. Tanulmányunkban közlünk egy törvényalkotási kronológiát, mely az USA-ra, az EU-ra és Kelet-Ázsiára fókuszál, illetve ismertetjük a BEREC 2011-es felmérésének az EU-ban alkalmazott, internetszolgáltatói gyakorlatra vonatkozó eredményeit. A munkát az Internet.org kezdeményezést vizsgáló esettanulmány zárja, végül ezt követik a jövővel kapcsolatos kérdések, és néhány lehetséges válasz. --- Net neutrality - definitions and the standpoints of legislators, content providers, Internet service providers and users This article examines the topic of net neutrality. Firstly, it provides us with a theoretical insight and several definitions. Then it presents the issues and challenges legislators, ISP’s, content providers and users face. Several authors state that the biggest virtue and value of Internet lies in open access, diversity, richness of content, free competition, and low barrier entry for users in order to participate in personal social communication. Our presentation of arguments pro and cons net neutrality will be built on the basis of these considerations. Priority will be given to the introduction of several categories of net neutrality violations. In our paper we will present a legislative chronology in the topic focusing on USA, EU and Korea-Japan as well as the findings of the 2011 BEREC survey. Finally we examine the Internet.org project. In the conclusion, the article offers several more issues to be discussed and provides some possible answers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Elissar Khloussy ◽  
Yuming Jiang

The net neutrality principle states that users should have equal access to all Internet content and that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should not practice differentiated treatment on any of the Internet traffic. While net neutrality aims to restrain any kind of discrimination, it also grants exemption to a certain category of traffic known as specialized services (SS), by allowing the ISP to dedicate part of the resources for the latter. In this work, we consider a heterogeneous LTE/WiFi wireless network and we investigate revenue-maximizing Radio Access Technology (RAT) selection strategies that are net neutrality-compliant, with exemption granted to SS traffic. Our objective is to find out how the bandwidth reservation for SS traffic would be made in a way that allows maximizing the revenue while being in compliance with net neutrality and how the choice of the ratio of reserved bandwidth would affect the revenue. The results show that reserving bandwidth for SS traffic in one RAT (LTE) can achieve higher revenue. On the other hand, when the capacity is reserved across both LTE and WiFi, higher social benefit in terms of number of admitted users can be realized, as well as lower blocking probability for the Internet access traffic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0920203X2110550
Author(s):  
Angela Xiao Wu ◽  
Luzhou Li

Often analysing ‘the Chinese Internet’ as a national entity, existing research has overlooked China's provincially oriented web portals, which have supplied information and entertainment to substantial user populations. Through the lenses of the critical political economy of media and critical media industry studies, this article traces the ascendance of China's provincial web from the late 1990s to the early 2000s by analysing industry yearbooks, official reports, conference records, personal memoirs, archived webpages, and user traffic data. We uncover interactions between Internet service providers, legacy media organizations, commercial Internet companies, and the central and local governments – each driven by discrete economic interests, political concerns, and imaginaries about the new technology. Delineating the emergence and consolidation of China's provincial web, our study foregrounds the understudied political economy of online content regionalization at scale. Further, it sheds new light on Chinese media policy, Internet governance, and Internet histories, especially the widely noted conservative turn of online cultures after the mid-2010s.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 102-113
Author(s):  
Alexey Gaivoronski ◽  
◽  
Vasily Gorbachuk ◽  
Maxim Dunaievskiy ◽  
◽  
...  

As computing and Internet connections become general-purpose technologies and services aimed at broad global markets, questions arise about the effectiveness of such markets in terms of public welfare, the participation of differentiated service providers and end-users. Motorola’s Iridium Global Communications project was completed in the 1990s due to similar issues, reaching the goal of technological connectivity for the first time. As Internet services are characterized by high innovation, differentiation and dynamism, they can use well-known models of differentiated products. However, the demand functions in such models are hyperbolic rather than linear. In addition, such models are stochastic and include providers with different ways of competing. In the Internet ecosystem, the links between Internet service providers (ISPs) as telecommunications operators and content service providers are important, especially high-bandwidth video content providers. As increasing bandwidth requires new investments in network capacity, both video content providers and ISPs need to be motivated to do so. In order to analyze the relationships between Internet service providers and content providers in the Internet ecosystem, computable models, based on the construction of payoff functions for all the participants in the ecosystem, are suggested. The introduction of paid content browsing will motivate Internet service providers to invest in increasing the capacity of the global network, which has a trend of exponential growth. At the same time, such a browsing will violate the principles of net neutrality, which provides grounds for the development of new tasks to minimize the violations of net neutrality and maximize the social welfare of the Internet ecosystem. The models point to the importance of the efficiency of Internet service providers, the predictability of demand and the high price elasticity of innovative services.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (04) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Yuqing XING

China—US trade war looks like a modern version of the Thucydides Trap. The devastating consequences of the trade war can be avoided if China takes the drastic step to open its market to US firms and allow foreign firms to have a level playing field to compete with Chinese firms. It is time that Chinese consumers embrace products “made beyond China”. Strengthening economic cooperation with the European Union (EU) and Japan would give China the leverage to counterbalance the pressure of the United States. China, however, should be ready to offer significant concessions in opening its domestic market too.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-205
Author(s):  
Carson Benowitz-Fredericks ◽  
Julia McQuoid ◽  
Nicolas Sheon ◽  
Sarah Olson ◽  
Pamela M. Ling

Smoke-free policies prevent exposure to secondhand smoke and encourage tobacco cessation. Local smoke-free policies that are more comprehensive than statewide policies are not allowed in states with preemption, including Oklahoma, which has the sixth highest smoking prevalence in the United States. In states with preemption, voluntary smoke-free measures are encouraged, but little research exists on venue owners’ and managers’ views of such measures, particularly in nightlife businesses such as bars and nightclubs. This article draws from semistructured interviews with 23 Oklahoma bar owners and managers, examining perceived risks and benefits of adopting voluntary smoke-free measures in their venues. No respondents expressed awareness of preemption. Many reported that smoke-free bars and nightclubs were an inevitable societal trend, particularly as younger customers increasingly expected smoke-free venues. Business benefits such as decreased operating and cleaning costs, improved atmosphere, and employee efficiency were more convincing than improved employee health. Concerns that voluntary measures created an uneven playing field among venues competing for customers formed a substantial barrier to voluntary measures. Other barriers included concerns about lost revenue and fear of disloyalty to customers, particularly older smokers. Addressing business benefits and a level playing field may increase support for voluntary smoke-free nightlife measures.


Author(s):  
Mohamed El Amrani ◽  
Hamid Garmani ◽  
Mohamed Baslam ◽  
Rachid El Ayachi

<p>In this work, we present an economic model of computer networks that describes the in-teraction between Internet Service Providers (ISP ), customers and content provider. The competition between ISP s may be translated by the prices they require and the qualities of service (QoS) they offer. The customer demand for service from an ISP does not only de-pend on the price and quality of service (QoS) of the ISP , but it is influenced by all those offered by its competitors. This behavior has been extensively analyzed using game the-ory as a decision support tool. We interpret a non-neutral network when a content provider privileges ISP s by offering them more bandwidth to ensure proper QoS to support ap-plications that require more data transport capacity (voice over internet protocol (V OIP ) the live video streaming, online gaming). In addition, our work focuses on the price game analysis and QoS between ISP s in two cases: neutral network and non-neutral network. After showing the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in terms of quality of service, we analyzed the impact of net neutrality on competition between ISP s. We also validated our theoretical study with numerical results, which show that the game has an equilibrium point which depends on all the parameters of the system.</p>


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