Off topic - RE: So why don't US citizens get this?

nancyp at yorku.ca nancyp at yorku.ca
Mon Jul 28 15:12:22 UTC 2008


Grad Student thesis rsrch one page: comments welcome ;)
however I have my good comments filter on...

Is Internet Reachability a Net Neutrality Issue?
----CRTC Chairperson Konrad von Finckenstein introduced Net Neutrality in his
speech to the 2007 Broadcasting Invitational Summit and again at the 2008
Canadian Telecom Summit mentioning that the CRTC's New Media Initiative will
include "striking a social, cultural and economic balance to deal with Internet
traffic prioritization".

----Traffic prioritization or traffic shaping is a small part of the entire
concept of a neutral network.

----The internet has no minimum standard of acceptable performance for
reachability of websites and data. As an information tool it becomes useless
without this reachability addressed as far as possible.

----The most famous example of non-neutrality in Canada occurred during the
Telus labour dispute (2005). Telus blocked access to a pro-union site by
blocking the server on which it was hosted. Researchers at Harvard, Cambridge
and the University of Toronto (OpenNet Initiative) found that Telus’s actions
resulted in an additional 766 unrelated sites also being blocked for
subscribers. Dealing with blocking access to servers and blocking access to
other networks are very important aims of a neutral internet.

----Example: A York University professor was sitting at his desk at work in
March 2008 trying to reach an internet website located somewhere in Europe. It
was important to his research so when he repeatedly could not reach the site he
contacted his IT department at the University. They were mystified why this
would be the case. The Professor went home after work and found that he could
reach the website from home consistently, for many days and was not ever able
to reach the website from the University campus network.York’s bandwidth
supplier is Cogent which had severed a peering relationship with a bandwidth
provider in Europe called Telia, which was the bandwidth network provider for
the website that the Professor was trying to reach. However at home, the
Professor purchased bandwidth from Rogers (and its upstream providers) who did
not sever their peering relationship with Telia. Cogent did not proactively
inform the University of the issue and the loss of connectivity. Unreachability
due to arbitrariness in network peering is unacceptable.

----Parts of the internet become unreachable for a great many reasons such as
line failure, cable cuts, misconfiguration of equipment and human error but to
add significantly and deliberately to this unreachability due to arbitrariness
in peering is unacceptable. End users whether award winning scholars, backyard
astronomers or teenage scientists require as much reachability of data as the
technology will allow. Political and economic persuasions should not be
permitted to condition and alter the media or the content.

----Recommendation: Bandwidth purchase agreements (Service Level Agreements)
that specify bandwidth, uptime and cost actually define connectivity thus they
should contain a list of peers or network interconnections that will be
maintained for the length of the agreement.
Prepared by Nancy Paterson, York University July 23, 2008 nancyp at yorku.ca

PS anyone willing to proof read a few technical pages of thesis paper? pls
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