In the opening session of the second day of the APDC Congress, three visions dominated the debate on the topic of the next 20 years, where talent management, the evolution of infrastructure and its business model and the promises of the Galileo system were dominant. .
François Bar, a professor at the University of California, aligned the main trends that define the intense debate in the United States about the neutrality of the Internet and how it will affect users and service providers. With an academic view, far from any of the factions, the professor presented the pros and cons of taxing the transmission of content over the Internet, paying a part of the revenues obtained from the services to the network owners.
“There are advantages and disadvantages, even for users”, admitted François Bar during his presentation, stating that it is necessary to protect users from service degradation and eventual blocking that operators may introduce to systems such as Skype, for example, preserving also innovation.
The dilemma presents itself because the need to tax content is used as an argument by the owners of the infrastructure to continue investing in the network. In this way, the degradation of the quality of the network service is avoided and the possibility of generating funds that create new investments in infrastructure is guaranteed.
The professor also says that to manage this situation it will be necessary to create good rules and be able to impose them, two subjects that present great challenges to regulators. “If I see that it is difficult to use Skype on a given network, it is almost impossible to verify if this is due to blocking systems introduced by the operator or the impressiveness of the traffic transmission itself”, exemplifies François Bar.
Although he did not take a position during his presentation in relation to any of the parties in dispute on this issue, on the sidelines of the session François Bar admitted to TeK that he prefers to keep some neutrality on the Internet.
The professor argues that it is dangerous that the US Government does not take a decision, in one sense, although he admits that in the current situation the threat imposed on network operators can act as a deterrent to anti-competitive situations. «The carriers they still have the threat of sanction by regulators, although it is very difficult to write a good rule for this matter and impose it ”, he says.
Debate that hardly affects EuropeFrançois Bar also explained that TeK believes that this Net Neutrality issue is unlikely to affect Europe. “The debate arises in the United States because there is so much power in cable networks and fixed operators. It was more a question of ‘jealousy’ of the fixed network because cable operators can prevent the transmission of content in their infrastructure, or tax them, while in fixed this is not possible ”, he justifies.
For this very reason, the professor believes that in Europe the question of the neutrality of the Web, or of taxing content guaranteeing a new recipe for operators, will not arise anytime soon or so urgently. «Europe still has to worry about creating situations of access to alternative infrastructures and that is why it is insisting on the liberalization of the local loop», he stresses.
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