President Barack Obama is reading What Is the What and has recommended that all his staff read it as well.

Valentino Achak Deng's life has been described by The New York Times as a testament "to human resilience over tragedy and disaster." Born in the village of Marial Bai, in Southern Sudan, he was forced to flee in the 1980s, at the age of seven, when civil war erupted. As one of the so-called Lost Boys, he trekked hundreds of miles, pursued by animals and government militias, and lived for years in refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. He eventually resettled in America, to a new set of challenges. Deng's life is the basis of Dave Eggers' epic book What Is the What, which Francine Prose calls "an extraordinary work of witness, and of art." In 2009, as part of his Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, he opened the Marial Bai Secondary School, the region's first proper high school. Read Nicolas Kristof's glowing New York Times Op-ed about the Marial Bai School in Sudan.

Valentino Deng spent his formative years in refugee camps, where he worked as a social advocate and reproductive health educator for the UN High Commission for Refugees. He has toured the United States and Europe, telling his story and becoming an advocate for social justice and the universal right to education. In 2006, Deng collaborated with Dave Eggers on What Is the What, an international bestseller that is now required reading on college campuses across America. With Eggers, Deng is co-founder of the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which helps rebuild Sudanese communities by providing educational opportunities and facilities.

Professor Anne Bartlett received her Ph.D. from the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago. She is a director of the Darfur Centre for Human Rights and Development based in London. Since 2002, Bartlett has worked with tribes and rebel groups from Darfur as part of a research project on insurgent politics. At the invitation of the Darfur delegation, Bartlett was the chair of the United Nations hearing on the Darfur crisis, UN commission on Human Rights, 60th Session, Geneva, Switzerland, April 2004. She was also a guest speaker at "The Human Rights and Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur (Western Sudan): Challenges to the International Community," UN Commission on Human Rights, 61st session, April 2005, Geneva, Switzerland. Bartlett has published extensively on the crisis and has given numerous talks on the Darfur crisis worldwide. She is currently working on a project that examines the effect of humanitarian intervention in the region.

Co-Sponsored by

The Billie Achilles Fund and the Bechtel International Center, Programs in International Relations, SAGE, Six Degrees & Human Rights Forum, STAND, Stanford Amnesty International, UNICEF, Program on Human Rights: CDDRL, Center for African Studies, & The Black Community Services Center

Who should decide how users can use the Internet? users or network providers? Should network providers be allowed to block certain applications or content on their networks? Should they be allowed to offer different classes of service to applications or content, and, if yes, whom should they be allowed to charge for this service? And should the answer to these questions differ depending on whether a network provider engages in these practices to manage bandwidth on its network?

Triggered by changes in Internet technology, these questions over network neutrality have moved to the center of the regulatory and legislative debates surrounding the Internet worldwide. They are at the core of the Open Internet Proceeding, launched by the Federal Communications Commission in October 2009 to explore what rules are needed to secure the Internet's openness. The talk will give an overview of the draft rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission and explain how the alternative options under consideration would affect the environment for political speech in the United States.

Barbara van Schewick's research focuses on the economic, regulatory, and strategic implications of communication networks. In particular, she explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to these changes. This work has made her a leading expert on the issue of network neutrality.Her book "Internet Architecture and Innovation" will be published by MIT Press this spring.

Professor van Schewick is the Faculty Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society and an assistant professor of electrical engineering (by courtesy) at Stanford's Department of Electrical Engineering.

Prior to joining the Stanford Law faculty, van Schewick was a senior researcher at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and a nonresidential fellow of the Center for Internet and Society. Van Schewick has advised the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research on innovation and technology policy and worked with the German Federal Network Agency on spectrum policy. From August 2000 to November 2001, she was the first residential fellow at the Center for Internet and Society.

Summary of the Seminar
Barbara van Schewick, Assistant Professor at the Stanford Law School, introduced the current debate about net neutrality and explored the implications for diversity and freedom of expression online.

Network providers were at one time ‘application blind' - they were unable to see what was contained in the data packets that allow information to be transmitted online. Now that this is no longer the case, a debate has emerged about the role for regulation in controlling the ability of network providers to block or interfere with applications. What was drawn up as a voluntary policy statement is now being considered and revised by the FCC's Open Internet Proceeding.

Blocking of applications is problematic on several counts. First, there may be incentives for network providers to block applications that threaten their own profitability (for example, Skype). This leads to a situation where the success of applications is no longer decided on user criteria and the overall value created for society diminishes. Second, the great promise of the internet is that it removes traditional gatekeepers (such as mass media outlets) to speech. This is undermined if network providers have the ability to control what content users see. This is particularly problematic since users cannot easily switch to another provider as they could if a particular store did not carry a product they wanted. The cost of switching makes this impractical and in places without a choice of providers, this is not an option.

In drawing up regulation against blocking the FCC is debating a number of related issues:

Discrimination: Even if blocking is prohibited, discriminating between levels of service can still allow network providers to slow down an application to the extent that it becomes un-useable. This is actually a more effective tool than blocking since it is much harder to detect. Users may attribute slow speeds to poor design and potentially useful applications will fail to get traction.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Charges for different levels of service: Even if we agree network providers should not discriminate between the services they provide in an arbitrary way, could they offer improved service for payment? Opponents argue that this policy would be bad for competition since new developers would be unable to pay for the levels of service that established players could afford. And it would threaten the ability of poorly resourced minority voices - e.g. small NGOs and publications - to get heard.

Exceptions to discrimination: Network providers argue that there needs to be some discrimination to allow them to undertake reasonable network management. But it is difficult to determine what counts as reasonable management. One concern is that peer to peer networks - which allow those without many resources to exchange material cheaply - might be targeted in particular, since they can create a lot of congestion. This might also threaten the ability of new applications with high bandwidths to get funding, since the risk of being slowed down by the networks would be perceived to be too high by investors.

Many of the major benefits of the internet - the ease of publishing and coordinating, for example - are only possible through applications. Hence the outcome of this debate will have serious implications for the future social and political impact of the internet.