dslreports logo
 story category
Google's Cerf No Fan Of Caps, Metered Billing
Not surprising for a content-creation and ad company...

As noted last week, the FCC's decision to sanction Comcast for packet forgery and P2P throttling is a little empty, given it it creates no new guidelines, doesn't really ask the cable company to do anything they weren't already voluntarily doing, and probably won't stand up to legal assault anyway. One thing the FCC ruling did accomplish (even if the industry doesn't know it yet) was shift the network neutrality discussion from throttling to caps and metered billing.

Almost on cue, Vint Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocol and now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, chimes in on the FCC decision and metered billing in a Google blog post. Cerf applauds Comcast's shift to a "protocol agnostic" solution, and says he's been pleased by the "tone and substance" of his conversation with Comcast engineers concerning their decision to only throttle the heaviest users (for a change). But after linking to Broadband Reports, he notes he's not much of a fan of caps or metered usage:
quote:
At least one proposal has surfaced that would charge users by the byte after a certain amount of data has been transmitted during a given period. This is a kind of volume cap, which I do not find to be a very useful practice. Given an arbitrary amount of time, one can transfer arbitrarily large amounts of information. Rather than a volume cap, I suggest the introduction of transmission rate caps, which would allow users to purchase access to the Internet at a given minimum data rate and be free to transfer data at at least up to that rate in any way they wish.
Reading Cerf's piece, it's not clear whether he's aware that in addition to Comcast's new, more tailored throttling, they're also considering 250GB caps and overage fees.

Most recommended from 78 comments



BabyBear
Keep wise ...with Nite-Owl
join:2007-01-11

2 recommendations

BabyBear

Member

Google it!

Ok Google here's your chance to be a WiMax (or something else) ISP. Then you can uncap us, provide some kicks in the ass to the AT&T's and Comcast's of the world. Perhaps drive down broadband prices? Adopt your own version of NebuAd packet sniffing for tracking and ads? Guess its better than NSA backrooms.