Tuesday Evening Links > verizon ... neutrality paranoia

verizon ... neutrality paranoia

Actually in a number of much more technical engineering forums (vs BBR) there is a fair amount of consensus that traffic priority of interactive vs non-interactive is the right thing to do. How this is done is a different discussion.

Here in BBR there are more end users than engineers so the conversation focuses on more entitlement aspects or broadband vs the technical merits. If you debate the majority, you are called a "fanboy". Many times it is not worth the effort as a few (who I am sure will reply to this) are not worth debating.
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"Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear." - Dinah Craik

I agree with much of your post but, as you say, the devil is in the details("How this is done is a different discussion" ).

Back in the day, when engineers actually drove most internet decision making such discussions were had as well. The key though is that engineers are driven by the desire to maximize the utility of the network for users. Business managers are driven by the desire to maximize the profit of their company controlling the last mile bottleneck.

Sure there would be discussions about network management if engineers made the decisions but those decisions wouldn't be warped by the incentives that drive management.
I suspect, if you were to really get inside the minds of engineers at comcast, for example, that many of them would express frustration at the decisions being made and the motives behind them. I don't believe that what comcast did was driven by the demands of engineers.

reply to telcolackey5
Let me put it another way. When I say we wouldn't be having these debates I don't mean that there wouldn't be discussion about network management, sensitivity of different applications to latency, etc.
I mean that the whole neutrality backlash, triggered by managers like ed whitacre exposing their intentions(which have little to do with the technical aspects of the network) with rhetoric about how the leeches of the world, like google, wouldn't be allowed to continue to use their network for free, would never have taken place.

Net neutrality advocates don't start out opposing network management discussions but it has become painfully obvious that many of the "network management" claims made by incumbents have a hidden agenda to subvert competitor services and use control of the last mile to extract additional revenues. This agenda has become more aggressive because 97% of broadband access for residential and small business is controlled by a telco/cableco duopoly and these companies intend to use their power.