| Net Neutrality's Not What They Think It Is The Washington Times article gives some examples of things that they think ISPs should be allowed to do which might violate a hypothetical network neutrality law. They claim that ISPs should have this as a "First Amendment" right.
To take the starkest example, suppose an ISP wants to offer a service that restricts access to Web sites promoting homophobic or racist views. This is perfectly fine in theory and doesn't violate Network Neutrality. Of course, in practice, I would hope that such a service was opt-in and that the list of blocked websites was able to be reviewed by a third party. Filters might raise other issues, ironically some First Amendment issues, but they wouldn't violate Network Neutrality.
Or suppose an ISP wants to prioritize the distribution of certain content such as video games or news feeds in order to make that content more attractive to consumers. This too is fine. Provided, of course, that they do it in a way that doesn't benefit one content provider above another offering a similar service. For example, an ISP shouldn't prioritize Washington Post's news feeds over CNN's news feeds. But saying that VOIP in general needs more bandwidth priority than web site surfing is just fine.
Or to provide certain service quality enhancements that would allow a new content provider to have a better chance to compete against an entrenched content provider, say, Google. Ah, now we get to a Network Neutrality violation. This is figuring that New Search Site X (let's call it "Bing"  ) enters into a deal so that traffic to and from their site goes faster than traffic to and from Google. This means that ISP customers see Google as the slower option and switch away. Unless Google pays the ISP for the "right" to faster speeds, of course.
This would mean that large websites would have a distinct advantage over smaller ones since large websites could afford to pay every ISP the Faster Service Fee. Small websites would be forced into "cattle class" speeds while large websites would be bumped to "first class."
Instead of giving new competitors a chance against entrenched websites, this type of ISP behavior would penalize newcomers and rewards the entrenched players. Unless an ISP had an ax to grind against an entrenched player and gave a newcomer a free "first class ticket", of course. This type of behavior from an ISP *definitely* should not be allowed.
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-Jason Levine
Support a children's charity. Buy a calendar and/or a photo book. Shooting For A Cause |
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| said by Jason Levine:Or to provide certain service quality enhancements that would allow a new content provider to have a better chance to compete against an entrenched content provider, say, Google. Ah, now we get to a Network Neutrality violation. This is figuring that New Search Site X (let's call it "Bing" ) enters into a deal so that traffic to and from their site goes faster than traffic to and from Google. This means that ISP customers see Google as the slower option and switch away. Unless Google pays the ISP for the "right" to faster speeds, of course. This would mean that large websites would have a distinct advantage over smaller ones since large websites could afford to pay every ISP the Faster Service Fee. Small websites would be forced into "cattle class" speeds while large websites would be bumped to "first class." Kinda like the ISP's voice solution priority vs a third party's?
A lot of your views work fine with low cost to enter the market and healthy competition, but when you're choice of ISPs is pretty much singular in nature there are no market forces to dictate what should be prioritized. You simply take what the ISP will deliver. Thus, protections must be put in place to ensure the same level of priority for all traffic. |
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 DarkLogixPremium
join:2008-10-23
Baytown, TX
kudos:3
2 edits | reply to Jason Levine
Heres an Idea that I think every one could go with
Issue a standard DSCP set of priorities
Make an RFC for it
then you can say all voip traffic must be marked between e0 and ef
then after setting in the rfc a set of what catagories should be in each dscp "zone" then all the program needs to do is set its dscp properly
to avoid abuse of this idea you could set only a guaranteed amount of bandwidth
ie a VoIP program would set its DSCP bit to anywhere between e0 and ef
then the isp set top priority on that
if a torent tries to use e0-ef then it wouldn't get much bandwidth
the in d0-df could be for gaming or such (more bandwidth but slightly lower priority)
00-0f could be for non-time critical data (ie not overly sensitive to lag)
then with all ISP's using the same set of dscp values they could even set voip to be able to use transit instead of a peering links if the lag is lower and torrents to stick to peers
it would be vendor nuetral so you could use any VoIP play any game
and I say use dscp in ranges so that it could be a gradient at it getts closer to 0f (so e0 would have more bandwidth than ef but ef would have less lag) |
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| The only problem with that is a LOT of consumer grade equipment doesn't know how to handle DSCP tags properly. DSCP only works well if every device on the network tags and interprets those tags properly.
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Kilroy was here |
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