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

[Jack Bates <jbates () brightok net>]

On 9/17/2010 2:08 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> Again, you are talking about symmetry and mistaking that for neutrality.
>
> Neutrality is about whether or not everyone faces a consistent set of terms and conditions, not identical service or 
> traffic levels.

Charging content providers for higher class service is perfectly neutral 
by your definition. So long as you offered the same class of service to 
all content providers who wished to pay.

> Neutrality is about letting the customer decide which content they want, not the ISP and expecting the ISP to be a fair 
> broker
> in connecting customers to content.

Offering better options to content providers would be perfectly 
acceptable here, as well, so long as you offer it to all.

> The former is adding capacity to meet demand. The latter is not effectively adding bandwidth, it is reducing bandwidth 
> for one to
> reward the other.

Which is fine, so long as you offer that class of service to all.

> The way this would work in the real world (and what people are objecting to) is that the ISP would transition from
>
> 1) 90mb public with no prioritization
>
> to
>
> 2) 90mb public with N mb prioritized via destination where N is the number of mbps that the destination
>         wanted to pay for.

Except my fictional account follows real world saturation experience 
historically. What you are giving is considered ideal compared to 
breaking the 90mb up to allow separate throughput for the service, which 
I guarantee a provider would do for enough money; given restriction of 
total available bandwidth.

> More importantly, it's not the 90mb public circuits where this is the real concern. The real concern is
> on the shared customer infrastructure side closer to the end-user where it's, say, 45mbps to the
> DSLAM going form 45mbps public to 45mbps public with 20mbps prioritized for content-provider-A
> while users trying to use content-provider-B get a degraded experience compared to A if their
> neighbors are using A. (Hence my belief that this is already a Sherman Anti-Trust issue).

I think that only qualifies if content-provider-B doesn't care to pay 
for such a service, but it is available to them.

> Neutrality means everyone faces the same odds and the same terms and conditions.
> It means that amongst the other customers sharing the same ISP infrastructure we are
> all treated fairly and consistently.

All customers can access the premium and non-premium content the same. 
ISP based licensing by content providers seems like a bigger scam.

> Apparently not an ISP that I would subscribe to.

Nope. You'd probably stick with a saturated bandwidth ISP and gripe 
about net-neutrality because your service is slightly more piss poor 
than your neighbors when your neighbor happens to go to a premium site 
and you don't. I'll stick with not having saturation on shared links.


Jack