Greetings. I'm very pleased to announce a new project from PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility:

Network Neutrality Squad - NNSquad

PFIR Co-Founders Peter G. Neumann and I are joined in this announcement by Vinton G. Cerf, Keith Dawson (Slashdot.org), David J. Farber (Carnegie Mellon University), Bob Frankston, Phil Karn (Qualcomm), David P. Reed, Paul Saffo, and Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane).

Recent events such as Comcast's lack of candor regarding their secretive disruption of BitTorrent protocols, and Verizon's altering of domain name lookup results to favor their own advertising pages, are but tip-of-the-iceberg examples of how easily Internet operations can be altered in ways that may not be immediately obvious, but that still can have dramatic, distorting, and in some cases far-reaching negative consequences for the Internet's users.

The Network Neutrality Squad ("NNSquad") is an open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet's users to help keep the Internet's operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions.

The project's focus includes detection, analysis, and incident reporting of any anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other restrictive actions on the part of Internet service Providers (ISPs) or affiliated entities, such as the blocking or disruptive manipulation of applications, protocols, transmissions, or bandwidth; or other similar behaviors not specifically requested by their customers.

Other key aspects of the project are discussions, technology development and deployment, and associated activities -- fostering cooperation and mutually agreeable methodologies whenever possible -- aimed at keeping the Internet a maximally unhindered, useful, competitive, fair, and open environment for the broadest possible range of applications and services.

We invite individual, commercial, nonprofit, government, and all other Internet users and stakeholders (including ISPs) to participate in the Network Neutrality Squad.

Please join the moderated mailing list (choice of immediate distribution or digest) for project announcements and discussions, by sending a message (any subject or text) to nnsquad-subscribe@nnsquad.org, or by signing up at the mailing list Web page.

A moderated, interactive discussion and incident reporting forum is also available for more real-time communications on related topics.

Questions and comments are welcome at nnsquad-info@nnsquad.org, or feel free to contact me directly for details.

Working together, we can help to keep the Internet an incredibly useful resource for everyone around the globe, unhampered by any efforts to skew its enormous capabilities in ways that could hinder the many while benefiting the relative few.

We hope that you'll join this cause. Thank you for your consideration.

--Lauren--

(Affiliations shown for identification purposes only.)