Re: AT&T says there is no duopoly, net neutrality is bad

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Date: October 25, 2007 11:34:24 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:  AT&T says there is no duopoly, net neutrality  
is bad

Sean - it's a reasonable suggestion.  But remember that Google and  
Vonage are just customers, too.

As is my personal account on Amazon's AWS constrained by Amazon's  
customer relationship with Verizon.

The simple case of prioritizing sounds simple, until you realize that  
any individual and their communications partners around the world  
rapidly construct a non-simple model.

QoS is not delivered by the "access network" alone.   It's a  
collective property that is dependent on path, and so forth.  So a  
negotiation by an end-consumer couch-potato with his last-mile  
provider cannot guarantee a prioritization, and there are LOTS of  
parties involved, and those parties are not Verizon or ATT or Comcast  
business partners.

Does tipping the postman guarantee that your airmail letter gets  
priority on its path from the US to a small town in Germany?   Well,  
your postman might like you to think so, if it boosts their tips.   
Same thing for the last mile fiber or copper provider.  Of course, if  
they aren't punished for screwing up your local path, you will get  
bad service.  So maybe paying protection money would be your only  
choice.  But protection money is not going to keep your parcel from  
being stolen en route.

David Farber wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Sean Berry <berry () housebsd org>
> Date: October 25, 2007 3:39:00 AM EDT
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: Re: [IP] AT&T says there is no duopoly, net neutrality is bad
>
>
> David:
>
> Does QoS address enough of these use cases that we could prioritize  
> traffic by tier?  I definitely know that I'd prefer my VOIP traffic  
> take higher priority than my video downloads.  I think I'd be happy  
> to be able to buy bandwidth like we used to do with frame relay:  
> 128kbps of "guaranteed" bandwidth, with the rest of 2Mbps or so  
> available "as-available" for a certain rate.  So ATT only needs to  
> build 128kbps (or some number) * the number of subscribers into  
> each region, but when it's not in use, any customer can use the  
> rest of the pipe.
>
> I think what we were most concerned about with Net Neutrality was  
> the idea of selling access to external corporations: what might  
> work better is letting the customer choose what kind of priorities  
> they might want: some would want a very affordable "0 bandwidth" or  
> minimum connection, to compete with dialup, while those with home  
> offices could justify (and leverage) faster guaranteed connections.


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