Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 21:38:58 -0700
________________________________________ From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu [Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu] Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2008 11:23 PM To: David Farber Cc: ip Subject: Re: [IP] Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer On Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:06:43 EDT, David Farber said:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1001480 "Net neutrality represents the prohibition of any contracting for enhanced service or guaranteed quality of service (QoS) between a broadband service provider and an Internet content provider. Such a prohibition would unwind existing contracts for QoS between broadband service providers and content providers. The anticompetitive harms that would be allegedly spared from such a prohibition pale in comparison to the efficiencies made possible by such contracting."
"efficiencies". Yeah, right. There's exactly *3* cases to deal with: 1) There's enough bandwidth available end-to-end. QoS is totally meaningless in this case, and does nothing. 2) There's a bottleneck, and some traffic has been flagged as "this data gets preferential treatment". If QoS takes effect, then some *other* traffic will by necessity be pushed to the rear of the queue or totally dropped. This is what most providers call QoS. The problem is that very rarely does the dropped traffic belong to the same customer that asked for the QoS. In other words, if *I* flag a data stream as "preferred" because it's VoIP or something, and the provider drops some other of *my* traffic, that's not a big problem. The "network neutrality" problem is when Content Provider X flags something with QoS, and in the process of providing that traffic to some other customer of my provider, *my* traffic gets dropped. 3) There's a bottleneck, and some traffic has been flagged as "bandwidth scavenger/can be dropped". When QoS kicks in, it of course is the first data to get heaved over the side. This would be nice if it happened, but as far as I can tell, it's basically a mythical beast that's rarely if ever actually sighted in the wild. The problem is that "efficiencies" (mostly not needing as much of an upstream pipe because you know what data has requested dropping) happen in the third case, but most providers try very hard to conflate that case with the second case, which can provide a revenue stream for them... ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer David Farber (Jun 22)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer David Farber (Jun 22)
- Re: Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer David Farber (Jun 22)
- Re: Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer David Farber (Jun 22)
- Re: Net Neutrality: A Radical Form of Non-Discrimination by Hal Singer David Farber (Jun 23)