NN: a crucial factor to enhance the flow of technology and content

“Information is an activity; information is a life form;

and information is a relation.”

J. P. Barlow

The Internet opened the possibility of breaking barriers of space, time and money, by developing an environment where people can innovate and express all the complexity of a human being. This innovation can be noticed in a very diverse range of knowledge and economics. Projects and services such as You Tube, Skype, Jamendo, Global Voices, OhmyNews , the wikis and the Free Software movement are great examples. This precise component helps to define the Information Society: a stage of the social development characterized by the capacity of its members in obtaining and share information, at any moment, from any place and in the manner that is most useful for them.

What gives the Internet this quality is what is called Network Neutrality (NN). The concept of NN derived from the age of the telegram, where the content was routed 'equally'. There was no effort to discern contents or adjusting for any kind of specific application. The question that is raised is why NN is important for a developing country such as Brazil? Information and communication technologies (ICT) – and the Internet as a part of it – have fundamentally changed the way we live, work, communicate and conduct business. Most of the world’s poorest people have not yet to experience the benefits of ICT, and the digital divide between the haves and have-nots continues to widen with time. This is the reality in Brazil.

A country with almost 190 million people, Brazil only had 10 percent of the population had access to Internet, and from those, almost 90% were dial access (source: ANATEL and IBGE). The great majority are in the industrial regions South and Southeast. Overall, this is a function of price; broadband prices in Latin America are still expensive when compared to the United States and Europe. Despite the significant growth in broadband subscriptions across most Latin American countries, broadband penetration rates are extremely low as a result of low per-capita incomes, relatively high broadband prices and poor availability of broadband services.

The Information Society means open space and opportunities for people in the Internet and in the traditional communication media to be capable of developing and sharing values, ideas and product content, as customers and producers. NN is central, because it preserves four important freedoms: (a) the access to content; (b) to run applications; (c) to attach devices and (d) to obtain service plan information; and these freedoms are essential to the learning process required to a person play a qualified role in the Information Society.

In terms of in developing countries, NN makes people capable of choosing their own opportunities and the roles they want to play, without facing barriers of different prices or different treatment of the information and technology that they want to access and share.

NN in Internet helps on the consolidation of democracy and social cohesion. Processes of filtering, quotation and accreditation, as suggested by Yochai Benkler, are key instruments to build a process of belonging. Specifically regarding the consolidation of the democracy in Brazil, the NN helps to guarantee the constitutional right to enjoy the benefits from the scientific progress, which means: (a) the right to access the benefit from the scientific and technological progress, (b) the right to set the priorities for research and (c) the right to be protected from the threatening results from this scientific progress; and other constitutional right such as the freedom of speech and information.

Consequently, the impact of losing NN in a developing country like Brazil would be the building of another tall hurdle to jump in the economic development. The lack of NN might place barriers on people from developing countries to participate in the global village and to nationalize the benefits of ICT for their economic and social development. This does not mean, however, that current diversity of the internet would not be preserved. Nevertheless, the internet is the reflection of different interests, and these interests are grouped into communities and people, as social beings, that would be part of communities that reflects their identity and their own diversity.