Net Neutrality and it's potential effect on Public Healthcare and Medical Research

Many of you may be wondering what the issue around Net Neutrality  
(NN) has to do with Healthcare and Life Sciences Research. The truth  
is we really don't know yet for sure, but it could be significant,  
and we shouldn't ignore the possible consequences at this very  
critical point in time-- I'll share some of the reasons I can think o...

Net Neutrality is under siege because of the corporate interests to  
generate large profits through the (bad) control of high-bandwidth  
access. The semantic web, though itself not requiring high-bandwidth  
(yet), opens the door to better access to large amounts of highly  
relevant information for the researchers, providers, and consumers of  
healthcare. Consider the following scenarios:

- Secure access for the Public to our private, managed electronic  
Health Records in the future, which will include not just our data  
and MRi scans, but intelligent references to background associated  
information and images pertaining to knowledge of diseases and  
available treatments.

- Guaranteeing all citizens the best possible care by providing full  
medical information to all care-givers everywhere; Hospitals need to  
offer access to National Health Library information to all their  
physicians and specialists (perhaps charters should be created here,  
for government health orgs such as NIH and NHS).

- Complete assembly of megavariate datasets (genes x dosing x tissue  
x genotype) and imaging data to be used by the full research  
community, e.g., BIRN.

- Mega-Grid applications involving petabyte simulations and analyses  
that can be requested by any scientist from anywhere in the world.

- Other areas of scientific research that will require high- 
bandwidth, including astronomy, geospatially distributed ecological  
data (e.g., NOAA), real-time, large-volume epidemiological studies  
for fast spreading diseases (e.g., SAR, H5N1 reporting, ).


All these require high-bandwidth network communications that should  
remain unhampered and evenly available to all. I would like to point  
you to TimBL's blog on this topic and on the issues surrounding Net  
Neutrality:  http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144

Another blog by Jon Stokes illustrates the salient points through  
examples:  http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060623-7127.html

I'm in no way suggesting changing the focus of HCLS, since it should  
remain true and productive to its goals. But the NN issues could have  
far-reaching consequences on the ideas and vision we're proposing,  
and I don't want our efforts to come to naught due to political  
myopia (any opthamologists on the list?). If others also feel this  
timely and needs to address, we can set up a WIKI to capture our  
thoughts and recommendations on the issues.

cheers,
Eric


Eric Neumann, PhD
co-chair, W3C Healthcare and Life Sciences,
and Senior Director Product Strategy
Teranode Corporation
83 South King Street, Suite 800
Seattle, WA 98104
+1 (781)856-9132
www.teranode.com