Re: Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Sep 16, 2010, at 11:35 AM, Chris Woodfield wrote:

> On Sep 16, 2010, at 10:57 07AM, George Bonser wrote:
> > >
> >
> > Hi Chris,
> >
> > Since prioritization would work ONLY when the link us saturated
> > (congested), without it, nothing is going to work well, not your
> > torrents, not your email, not your browsing.  By prioritizing the
> > traffic, the torrents might back off but they would still continue to
> > flow, they wouldn't be completely blocked, they would just slow down.
> > QoS can be a good thing for allowing your VIOP to work while someone
> > else in the home is watching a streaming movie or something.  Without
> > it, everything breaks once the circuit is congested.
>
> Your statement misses the point, which is, *who* gets to decide what traffic is prioritized? And will that 
> prioritization be determined by who is paying my carrier for that prioritization, potentially against my own 
> preferences? For some damn reason, I might *prefer* that my torrent traffic get prioritized over, say, email. Or, I 
> might not appreciate the eventuality that a stream I'm watching on hulu.com stutters because my neighbor's watching a 
> movie on Netflix and it just happens that Netflix has paid my carrier for prioritized traffic.
>
> The other point, as mentioned previously, is that paid prioritization doesn't mean a thing unless there's congestion 
> to be managed. It's not a far stretch to see exec-level types seeing the potential financial benefits to, well, 
> ensuring that such congestion does show up in their network in order to create the practical incentives for paid 
> prioritization.
>
> -C
Yep... If you don't believe that will happen, I refer you to Enron vs. California ISO and the
lovely changes to the electricity market in California around that time.

Owen