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debates about the nature, the architecture and the governing principles of the internet are not merely technical or economic discussions.  Above all, these debates have deep political, social, and cultural implications and become a matter of public, national and global interest.

In many ways, net neutrality could be considered the first amendment of the internet; no pun intended here. However, just as with freedom of speech the principle of net neutrality cannot be approached as absolute or as a fetish. Even in a democracy we cannot say everything applies all the time in all contexts. Limiting the core principle of freedom of speech in a democracy is only possible in very specific circumstances, such as harm, racism or in view of the public interest. Along the same lines, compromising on the principle of net neutrality should be for very specific and clearly defined reasons that are transparent and do not serve commercial private interests, but rather public interests or are implemented in view of guaranteeing an excellent quality of service for all.

One of the only really convincing arguments of those challenging net neutrality is that due to the dramatic increases in streaming activity and data-exchange through peer-to-peer networks, the overall quality of service risks being compromised if we stick to data being treated on a first come first serve basis. We are being told that popular content will need to be stored closer to the consumer, which evidently comes at an extra cost.

The measure, which was adopted with a broad majority in the lower house of parliament, will prevent KPN, the Dutch telecommunications market leader, and the Dutch arms of Vodafone and T-Mobile from blocking or charging for internet services like Skype or WhatsApp, a free text service. Its sponsors said that the measure would pass a pro forma review in the Dutch senate.

The Dutch restrictions on operators are the first in the EU. The European commission and European parliament have endorsed network neutrality guidelines but have not yet taken legal action against operators that block or impose extra fees on consumers using services such as Skype, the voice and video service being acquired by Microsoft, and WhatsApp, a mobile software maker based in California.

Advocates hailed the move as a victory for consumers, while industry officials predicted that mobile broadband charges could rise in the Netherlands to compensate for the new restrictions.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed. He has been asked by the UK government to negotiate an agreement on an open internet between service providers and content firms like the BBC and Skype. Sir Tim would prefer self-regulation by the internet industry, but progress has been slow. "If it fails the government has to be absolutely ready to legislate," he said. "It may be that the openness of the internet, we should just put into law." Net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, has been a controversial issue in the United States and is now moving up the political agenda in the UK.

Internet Service Providers have claimed that they need to be able to control the growing traffic online, and content creators fear that the result could be a two-speed internet. Sir Tim said that he understands the need for traffic management but any move to discriminate between different content businesses would be a step too far.

"What you lose when you do that is you lose the open market," he said. "What the companies gain is that they get complete control of you." But Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute warned that enshrining net neutrality in law had its dangers. "Once you allow the state in, you open the door to all sorts of regulation of the internet controls on content creation," he said.

The SavetheInternet.com Coalition is two million everyday people who have banded together with thousands of nonprofit organizations, businesses and bloggers to protect Internet freedom. The Coalition believes that the Internet is a crucial engine for economic growth, civic engagement and free speech. We're working together to preserve Net Neutrality, the First Amendment of the Internet, which ensures that the Internet remains open to new ideas, innovation and voices. Because of Net Neutrality, the Internet has always been a level playing field. People everywhere can have their voices heard by thousands, even millions, of others online. The SavetheInternet.com Coalition wants our leaders in Washington to pass strong Net Neutrality protections. We're calling on the president, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to stand with the public and keep the Internet open.

Republicans are traditionally against onerous regulation of private industry, and many campaigned on promises to rein in government before the midterm elections, which saw the GOP pick up 60 House seats to secure the majority.

As a result, Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc and Comcast Corp have gained the upper hand in the long-fought battle over net neutrality rules,

The underlying idea of net neutrality is that high-speed and mobile Internet providers should not be allowed to give preferential treatment to content providers that pay for faster transmission.Companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast have lobbied against such regulations, saying they could crimp profits and lessen investments.At stake is how quickly handheld devices, like Research in Motion Ltd's BlackBerry and Apple Inc's iPhone, can receive and download videos and other content.

What is important in Zuckerberg’s story is not that he’s a boy genius. He plainly is, but many are. It’s not that he’s a socially clumsy (relative to the Harvard elite) boy genius. Every one of them is. And it’s not that he invented an amazing product through hard work and insight that millions love. The history of American entrepreneurism is just that history, told with different technologies at different times and places.

what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing. Zuckerberg didn’t invent that platform. He was a hacker (a term of praise) who built for it. And as much as Zuckerberg deserves endless respect from every decent soul for his success, the real hero in this story doesn’t even get a credit. It’s something Sorkin doesn’t even notice.

Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today.

Free Speech Online UnderAttack By Tim Karr, February 17, 2011

Republicans in Congress introduced a "resolution" in both chambers that would give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over Internet speech

If their resolution passes, the FCC would not just be barred from enforcing its already weak Net Neutrality rule, but also from acting in any way to protect Internet users against corporate abuses by AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

Plato showed convincingly in his Euthyphro dialogue that even if gods existed they would not help at all settling the question of morality.

Broadly speaking, deontological approaches fall into the same category as consequentialism — they are concerned with what we ought to do, as opposed to what sort of persons we ought to be (the latter is, most famously, the concern of virtue ethics). That said, deontology is the chief rival of consequentialism, and the two have distinct advantages and disadvantages that seem so irreducible

Here is one way to understand the difference between consequentialism and deontology: for the former the consequences of an action are moral if they increase the Good (which, as we have seen, can be specified in different ways, including increasing happiness and/or decreasing pain). For the latter, the fundamental criterion is conformity to moral duties. You could say that for the deontologist the Right (sometimes) trumps the Good. Of course, as a result consequentialists have to go through the trouble of defining and justifying the Good, while deontologists have to tackle the task of defining and justifying the Right.

Freedom Box is the name we give to a personal server running a free software operating system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy. Freedom Box software is particularly tailored to run in "plug servers," which are compact computers that are no larger than power adapters for electronic appliances. Located in people's homes or offices such inexpensive servers can provide privacy in normal life, and safe communications for people seeking to preserve their freedom in oppressive regimes.

Because social networking and digital communications technologies are now critical to people fighting to make freedom in their societies or simply trying to preserve their privacy where the Web and other parts of the Net are intensively surveilled by profit-seekers and government agencies. Because smartphones, mobile tablets, and other common forms of consumer electronics are being built as "platforms" to control their users and monitor their activity. Freedom Box exists to counter these unfree "platform" technologies that threaten political freedom. Freedom Box exists to provide people with privacy-respecting technology alternatives in normal times, and to offer ways to collaborate safely and securely with others in building social networks of protest, demonstration, and mobilization for political change in the not-so-normal times. Freedom Box software is built to run on hardware that already exists, and will soon become much more widely available and much more inexpensive. "Plug servers" and other compact devices are going to become ubiquitous in the next few years, serving as "media centers," "communications centers," "wireless routers," and many other familiar and not-so-familiar roles in office and home. Freedom Box software images will turn all sorts of such devices into privacy appliances. Taken together, these appliances will afford people around the world options for communicating, publishing, and collaborating that will resist state intervention or disruption. People owning these appliances will be able to restore anonymity in the Net, despite efforts of despotic regimes to keep track of who reads what and who communicates with whom. For a list of specific Freedom Box capabilities, check out our Goals page.

Most people think of the term in the context of production of goods and services: more efficient means more valuable output is wrung from a given bundle of real resources (which is good) or that fewer real resources are burned up to produce a given output (which is also good).

In economics, efficiency is also used to evaluate alternative distributions of an available set of goods and services among members of society. In this context, I distinguished in last week’s post between changes in public policies (reallocations of economic welfare) that make some people feel better off and none feel worse off and those that make some people feel better off but others feel worse off.

consider whether economists should ever become advocates for a revaluation of China’s currency, the renminbi — or, alternatively, for imposing higher tariffs on Chinese imports. Such a policy would tend to improve the lot of shareholders and employees of manufacturers competing with Chinese imports. Yet it would make American consumers of Chinese goods worse off. If the renminbi were significantly and artificially undervalued against the United States dollar, relative to a free-market exchange rate without government intervention, that would be tantamount to China running a giant, perennial sale on Chinese goods sold to the United States. If you’re an American consumer, what’s not to like about that? So why are so many economists advocating an end to this sale?

This post is about how one should deal with a denialist of Delingpole's ilk.

I saw someone I follow on Twitter retweet an update from another Twitter user called @AGW_IS_A_HOAX, which was this: "NZ #Climate Scientists Admit Faking Temperatures http://bit.ly/fHbdPI RT @admrich #AGW #Climategate #Cop16 #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming".

So I click on it. And this is how you deal with a denialist claim. You actually look into it. Here is the text of that article reproduced in full: New Zealand Climate Scientists Admit To Faking Temperatures: The Actual Temps Show Little Warming Over Last 50 YearsRead here and here. Climate "scientists" across the world have been blatantly fabricating temperatures in hopes of convincing the public and politicians that modern global warming is unprecedented and accelerating. The scientists doing the fabrication are usually employed by the government agencies or universities, which thrive and exist on taxpayer research dollars dedicated to global warming research. A classic example of this is the New Zealand climate agency, which is now admitting their scientists produced bogus "warming" temperatures for New Zealand. "NIWA makes the huge admission that New Zealand has experienced hardly any warming during the last half-century. For all their talk about warming, for all their rushed invention of the “Eleven-Station Series” to prove warming, this new series shows that no warming has occurred here since about 1960. Almost all the warming took place from 1940-60, when the IPCC says that the effect of CO2 concentrations was trivial. Indeed, global temperatures were falling during that period.....Almost all of the 34 adjustments made by Dr Jim Salinger to the 7SS have been abandoned, along with his version of the comparative station methodology."A collection of temperature-fabrication charts.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.

The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”

Almost anyone could have one of these tiny servers, which are now produced for limited purposes but could be adapted to a full range of Internet applications, he said. “They will get very cheap, very quick,” Mr. Moglen said. “They’re $99; they will go to $69. Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29.”

The most disturbing example of this response came from the head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, who said, “I don't think we should be blaming any Afghan. We should be blaming the person who produced the news — the one who burned the Koran. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of offending culture, religion, traditions.” I was not going to comment on this monumentally inane line of thought, especially since Susan Jacoby, Michael Tomasky, and Mike Labossiere have already done such a marvelous job of it. But then I discovered, to my shock, that several of my liberal, progressive American friends actually agreed that Jones has some sort of legal and moral responsibility for what happened in Afghanistan

I believe he has neither. Here is why. Unlike many countries in the Middle East and Europe that punish blasphemy by fine, jail or death, the U.S., via the First Amendment and a history of court decisions, strongly protects freedom of speech and expression as basic and fundamental human rights. These include critiquing and offending other citizens’ culture, religion, and traditions. Such rights are not supposed to be swayed by peoples' subjective feelings, which form an incoherent and arbitrary basis for lawmaking. In a free society, if and when a person is offended by an argument or act, he or she has every right to argue and act back. If a person commits murder, the answer is not to limit the right; the answer is to condemn and punish the murderer for overreacting.

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Governments have an interest in condemning certain speech that provokes immediate hatred of or violence against people. The canonical example is yelling “fire!” in a packed room when there in fact is no fire, since this creates a clear and imminent danger for those inside the room. But Jones did not create such an environment, nor did he intend to. Jones (more precisely, Wayne Sapp) merely burned a book in a private ceremony in protest of its contents. Indeed, the connection between Jones and the murders requires many links in-between. The mob didn’t kill those accountable, or even Americans.

1. Putting a price on carbon is not only about the climate.Yes, humans are affecting the climate and reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a key commitment of this government, and indeed the stated views of the opposition. But there are other reasons to price carbon, primarily to put Australia at the forefront of a global energy technology revolution that is already underway.In future years and decades the world is going to need vastly more energy that is secure, reliable, clean and affordable. Achieving these outcomes will require an energy technology revolution. The purpose of pricing carbon is to raise the revenues needed to invest in this future, just as we invest in health, agriculture and defence.

2. A price on carbon raises revenues to invest in stimulating that energy technology revolution.Australia emits almost 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. In round numbers, every dollar carbon tax per tonne on those emissions would raise about A$100 million. A significant portion of the proceeds from a carbon tax should be used to invest in energy technology innovation, using today’s energy economy to build a bridge to tomorrow’s economy. This is exactly the strategy that India has adopted with a small levy on coal and Germany has adopted with a tax on nuclear fuel rods, with proceeds in both instances invested into energy innovation.

3. The purpose of a carbon tax is not to make energy, food, petrol or consumer goods appreciably more expensive.Just as scientists are in broad agreement that humans are affecting the global climate, economists and other experts are in broad agreement that we cannot revolutionise our energy economy through pricing mechanisms alone. Thus, we propose starting with a low carbon tax - one that has broad political support - and then committing to increasing it in a predictable manner over time.The Coalition has proposed a “direct action plan” on carbon policy that would cost A$30 billion over the next 8 years, which is the equivalent of about a $2.50 per tonne carbon tax. The question to be put to the Coalition is not whether we should be investing in a carbon policy, as we agree on that point, but how much and how it should be paid for. The Coalition’s plans leave unanswered how they would pay for their plan.A carbon tax offers a responsible and effective manner to raise funds without harming the economy or jobs. In fact, to the extent that investments in energy innovation bear fruit, new markets will be opened and new jobs will be created. The Coalition’s plan is not focused on energy technology innovation.The question for the Coalition should thus be, at what level would you set a carbon tax (or what other taxes would you raise?), and how would you invest the proceeds in a manner that accelerates energy technology innovation?