Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?

Mon Sep 13 15:06:03 UTC 2010

In a message written on Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 09:44:40AM -0500, Brian Johnson wrote:
> OK... so doesn't this speak to the commoditization of service providers?
> I'm against more regulation and for competition.

Competition would be wonderful, but is simply not practical in many
cases.  Most people and companies don't want to hear this, but from
a consumer perspective the Internet is a utility, and very closely
resembles water/sewer/electric/gas service.  That is, having 20
people run fiber past your home when you're only going to buy from
one of them makes no economic sense.  Indeed, we probably wouldn't
have both cable and DSL service if those were both to the home for
other reasons already.

> Explain how the provider of access is supposed to be able to control all
> of the systems outside it's control to get a specific speed from a
> content provider. If you are espousing contracts with each content
> provider, then you will quickly be destroying the Internet.

That's not exactly what I am proposing; rather I'm proposing we
(the industry) develop a set of technical specifications and testing
where we can generally demonstrate this to be the case.  Of course,
things may happen at any time, this isn't about individual machines,
or flash mobs.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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