Intellectual Property Law

Shareholders Question ISP Network Management

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

A coalition of investors anchored by the New York City pension funds has filed resolutions for consideration at the 2009 annual shareholder meetings of major internet service providers, seeking more information about their network management practices and impacts on customer’s privacy and free expression. In particular, the group wants to know more about deep packet inspection and traffic shaping, including some of the practices that “network neutrality” advocates seek to curb with legislation.

The coalition was organized by Open MIC, a group seeking to involve investors and other private sector actors in efforts to promote openness in the development of communications media and preserve the “democratizing potential of the digital era.”

Derek and I have both written here before about the importance of market-oriented efforts of this type. Here’s Derek’s post. As I said just about two years ago:

Activists and policy wonks who work with environmental issues take it for granted that private corporate activities and markets lie at the center of both the problems and the potential solutions … to issues such as water pollution, global warming, and habitat destruction. … Until recently, the same was not true for info/law issues. The problems were often seen as based almost entirely on some combination of legal regulation and technological architecture. Tech companies were regarded as ideals by many socially responsible investors ? they had low environmental impacts, typically they had progressive employment policies and benefits, and their supply chains did not involve the sorts of entanglements with corrupt regimes and human rights problems that beset industries from oil to global agriculture.

There is still a significant lag in the application of the “corporate responsibility” ethos and tactics to the problems of Info/Law. But this move by Open MIC is another sign that such efforts are emerging, albeit very very slowly.

Full post as published by Info/Law on February 04, 2009 (boomark / email).