Jeff sez, "Recently, Boing Boing shared our post suggesting that local communities could take inspiration from Pittsburgh's City Council ban on fracking and make net neutrality law, instead of waiting for Congress. Working with CELDF, the author of the Pittsburgh law, Envision Seattle has authored a model ordinance to legislate Net Neutrality .
This post contains the first draft of the model net neutrality ordinance which we will ask the Seattle City Council to pass. We encourage other communities to study the ordinance and adopt it in their own jurisdictions. Our ordinance is meant to be used as a template for municipalities around the U.S. and globally as a starting point in codifying their right to a free and open Internet.
p.s. Today, the Netherlands became the first European country to make Net Neutrality law."
The Seattle City Council and the people of Seattle find that access to the broadband internet creates opportunity for more direct civic engagement and increased educational attainment and free speech; and that such access enables people to more fully participate in a democratic process. To date, the network design principles fostering the development of the broadband internet – an end-to-end design, layered architecture, and open standards – promote innovation at the edge of the network and gives end users choice and control of their online activities.
The City Council and the people of Seattle find that those network design principles have led to the network neutrality of the internet, where there are no paid-for premium fast lanes and best effort slow lanes. We recognize that technologies now allow network operators to distinguish between different classes of internet traffic, to offer different qualities-of-service, and to charge different prices to each class of internet traffic. We also recognize that broadband internet access service providers have an economic interest to discriminate in favor of their own or affiliated services, content, and applications, and against other providers of such services, content, and applications.
Model Net Neutrality Ordinance for Seattle
(Thanks, Jeff!)
(Image: Net Neutrality News Tag Cloud, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from seanweigoldferguson's photostream)
