What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

Sun Apr 27 17:56:30 UTC 2014

On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 2:05 AM, Rick Astley <jnanog at gmail.com> wrote:
> #3 On paid peering:
> I think this is where people start to disagree but I don't see what should
> be criminal about paid peering agreements. More specifically, I see serious
> problems once you outlaw paid peering and then look at the potential
> repercussions that would have.

Double-billing Rick. It's just that simple. Paid peering means you're
deliberately billing two customers for the same byte -- the peer and
the downstream. And not merely incidental to ordinary service - the
peer specifically connects to gain access to customers who already pay
you and no one else. Where those two customers have divergent
interests, you have to pick which one you'll serve even as you
continue to bill both. That's a corrupt practice.

What sort of corrupt practice? You might, for example, degrade your
residential customers' speed to the part of the Internet housing a
company you think should pay you for peering. Or permit the link to
deteriorate while energetically upgrading others to keep pace with the
times. Same difference.

This doesn't have to be true. You could bill downstreams for
consumption and exclude the paid peering from that calculation. But
you don't do that. And you aren't planning to.

> #4 On QoS (ie fast lane?):
> In some of the articles I skimmed there was a lot of talk about fast lane
> traffic but what this sounds like today would be known as QoS and
> classification marking that would really only become a factor under
> instances of congestion. The tech bloggers and journalists all seems to be
> unanimously opposed to this but I admit I am sort of scratching my head at
> the outrage over something that has been in prevalent use on many major
> networks for several years.

It's prevalent on private work networks and users hate it. It
generally disables activities the network owners don't approve of
while engaging in doubletalk about how they're OK with it. Users don't
want to see this migrate outward.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
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