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152 Part 1 Introduction

Audio and video standards

Traditionally sound and video, or ‘rich media’, have been stored as the Microsoft standards
.wav and .avi. A newer sound format for music is mp3. These formats are used on some web
sites, but they are not appropriate for sites such as the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk), since the user
Streaming media would have to wait until the whole clip downloads before hearing or viewing it. Streaming
Sound and video that can media are now used for many multimedia sites since they enable video or audio to start
be experienced within a
web browser before the playing within a few seconds – it is not necessary for the whole file to be downloaded before
whole clip is downloaded. it can be played. Formats for streaming media have been established by Real Networks
(www.realnetworks.com). Rich media such as Flash applications, audio or video content can
also be stored on a web server, or a specialist streaming media server.

Focus on Internet governance

In Chapter 4 we will look briefly at how governments promote and control, through laws, the
use of the Internet in their jurisdiction. In this section, we look at the growth of the Internet as
a global phenomenon and how the standards described in the previous section were devised.
The Internet is quite different from all previous communication media since it is much less
easy for governments to control and shape its development. Think of print, TV, phone and
radio and you can see that governments can exercise a fair degree of control on what they find
acceptable. With the Internet, governments can have a say, but their control is diminished.
Esther Dyson (1998) has been influential in advising on the impact of the Internet on
Internet governance society; she describes Internet governance as the control put in place to manage the growth
Control of the operation of the Internet and its usage. Governance is traditionally undertaken by government, but the
and use of the Internet.
global nature of the Internet makes it less practical for a government to control cyberspace.
Dyson says:

Now, with the advent of the Net, we are privatizing government in a new way – not only in
the traditional sense of selling things off to the private sector, but by allowing organizations
independent of traditional governments to take on certain ‘government’ regulatory roles.
These new international regulatory agencies will perform former government functions in
counterpoint to increasingly global large companies and also to individuals and smaller
private organizations who can operate globally over the Net.
Dyson (1998) describ es different layers of jurisdiction. These are:
1 Physical space comprising individual countries in which their own laws such as those
governing taxation, privacy and trading and advertising standards hold.
2 ISPs – the connection between the physical and virtual worlds.

There are a number of established non-profit-making organizations that control different
aspects of the Internet. These are sometimes called ‘supra-governmental’ organizations since
their control is above government level. We will explore each of these in turn.

The net neutrality principle
Network neutrality Net or network neutrality is a principle that many advocate based on the organic way in
‘Net neutrality’ is the which the Internet grew during the 1980s and 1990s. The principle enshrines equal access to
principle of provision of
equal access to different the Internet and the web which is threatened by two different forces. First and the most
Internet services by common context for net neutrality is the desire by some telecommunications companies
telecommunications and ISPs to offer tiered access to particular Internet services. The wish of the ISPs is to
service providers.
potentially offer different quality of service, i.e. speed, to consumers based on the fee paid by
the upstream content provider. So potentially ISPs could charge companies such as TV