Mutual Service Agreement

Version 1 - July 2004

An iStumbler white paper by Alf Watt.

Preamble

Most network service agreements are developed to restrict your use of network bandwidth and services as well as your freedom to further distribute the bandwidth and services you are paying for. These restrictive service agreements are necessary to manage the scarce resources of leased lines and licensed spectrum. The are a natural and unfortunate consequence of centralized resource management, and are necessary to deal with centrally owned and controlled networks.

The Mutual Service Agreement (MSA) is designed to ensure that you have free, unrestricted access to network bandwidth and services and to maintain your right to redistribute that access under the same terms. The MSA is applicable to network environments which use unlicensed spectrum and free point to point links in order to support a public routing and distribution infrastructure which is owned directly by it's members and builders.

Article 1 - Terms of the Agreement

All rights and responsibilities defined in this agreement MUST be granted and applied equally to all signatories.

Bandwidth provided under this agreement may not be distributed under any other service agreement and may not be charged for.

Article 2 - Rights of Every Network User

The .public network recognizes communication as a basic human right. Content filtering, intereception of communications and restrictions on network use fundamentally violate this right.

All signatories of this agreement must provide access to bandwidth and services to any number of signatories and non signatories at all times.

Article 3 - Rights and Responsibilities of Signatories

Signatories MUST operate directly or by proxy a .public site which is connected to at least one other .public site OR directly to the public Internet.

Signatories MAY limit the aggregate bandwidth provided to non-signatories to 100KiB/S or 10% of the available bandwidth, which-ever is greater.

Signatories MAY revoke their signature at any time for any reason with no further obligation.

Signatories MUST provide for equal access for other signatories to all bandwidth not reserved for dedicated public access.

Signatories MAY inspect traffic for routing or statistical purposes but MUST respect the privacy of all information and may not log traffic with identifying information or inspect the contents of packets without the express prior permission of all parties.

Article 4 - Applicability of the Agreement

This agreement is applicable only to bandwidth and services provided across unleashed links or unlicensed spectrum.

This agreement MUST NOT be applied to bandwidth which has an encumbering service agreement.

Copyright © 02006, Alf Watt (alf@istumbler.net). All rights reserved. Redistribution and use permitted under BSD License in license.txt.