Level 3 Communications Issues Statement ConcerningComcast'sActions

Tue Nov 30 08:34:37 UTC 2010

It's a popular concept that competition will resolve NN concerns. A couple
of weeks back I taped Barbara Van Schewick expounding on her theme that
blocking, discrimination, and/or access charges, ARE acceptable if at the
users - rather than provider's - discretion.
http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=1459

Afterwards, I asked her about the effect of competition. She remarked that,
according to her research, countries with competition, such as the Euro
unbundling regimes like the UK, actually had a much higher likelihood of
such network management practices that the duopolist USA as the providers
were under greater pressure to optimize the economic value of every bit put
through.

<http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=1459>Plusnet's transparency would seem to be
indicative of a trend toward Van Schewick style solutions, where user's have
a bandwidth dashboard where they can opt to throttle
application-by-application, plus possibly receive targeted ads, to get a
cheaper connection.

j

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:13 AM, Michael Painter <tvhawaii at shaka.com> wrote:

> Ben Butler wrote:
>
>> Same hymn sheet, if they pay enough the cost averaging model works again
>> and we don't have to worry about latency critical or
>> transfer volume.  The problem is that they wont pay for it.
>>
>
> I became interested in these guys: http://www.plus.net/?home=hometop in
> 2008 because they were one of the first
> to use DPI (and admit it) to enforce their TOS.  Every time I check their
> site (~every 8-10months), they seem to have won another award.
> Is 'Net Neutrality', the FCC, or something else preventing a model like
> this from having success in the U.S.?
> Or does it exixt and I just haven't heard about it?
>
> --Michael
>
>
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: wherrin at gmail.com [mailto:wherrin at gmail.com] On Behalf Of William
>> Herrin
>> Sent: 30 November 2010 04:17
>> To: Ben Butler
>> Cc: NANOG list
>> Subject: Re: Level 3 Communications Issues Statement Concerning
>> Comcast'sActions
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 10:51 PM, Ben Butler <ben.butler at c2internet.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Then consumer broadband came along, the subs went
>>> down, the headline speeds went up, service delivery
>>> becomes impossible in the face of the marketing BS
>>> ---- and here we are.
>>>
>>
>> Hi Ben,
>>
>> So you're saying: treat it like electrical service. I have a 200 amp
>> electrical service at my house. But I don't pay for a 200 amp service,
>> I pay for kilowatt-hours of usage.
>>
>> There are several problems transplanting that billing model to
>> Internet service. The first you've already noticed - marketing
>> activity has rendered it unsalable. But that's not the only problem.
>>
>> Another problem is that the price of electricity has been very stable
>> for a very long time, as has the general character of devices which
>> consume it. Consumers have a gut understanding of the cost of leaving
>> the light on. But what is a byte? How much to load that web page?
>> Watch that movie? And doesn't Moore's Law mean that 18 months from now
>> it should cost half as much? If I can't tell whether or not I'm being
>> ripped off, I'm probably being ripped off.
>>
>> A third problem is the whole regulated monopoly thing. The electric
>> company had to be slapped down hard by the government to make its
>> billing process fair. Anything we can do to avoid that fate is money
>> in the bank, even if it means allowing the occasional customer to get
>> more than he paid for.
>>
>> So if we can't bill you by usage, and at a consumer level we can't,
>> then we have to find another way. Statistics and prayer isn't working
>> out as well as we'd hoped so we're looking at double-billing schemes.
>> Bad plan!
>>
>> Regards,
>> Bill Herrin
>>
>
>
>

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