NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: "discrimination based on user-history" - will fairness make congestion the norm?
On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Barry Gold <bgold@matrix-consultants.com> wrote: > This is one more reason why I am leaning more and more toward allowing ISPs > (as opposed to backbone providers) a lot of freedom in traffic management. > Not _total_ freedom: I think that the FCC should take action if/when an > ISP's "traffic management" amounts to completely blocking some application, > or heavily throttling some application even at low-traffic times (as has > been reported wrt Comcast). > My thought is any decision BETWEEN users should be protocol agnostic: If person A is using his bits to pirate "Alaska Smith and the Shiny MacGuffin" while B is watching "YouTube Clone for Porn", should the ISP even attempt to distinguish between the two? Otherwise, the precident is very dangerous, as the ISP could favor "Provider A" over "Provider B" for effectively the same content. But I believe there is a huge role for protocol discrimination WITHIN a user's flow. If User A is doing VoIP, web surfing, and BitTorrent, it is natural that, in the absence of other information, when the ISP needs to restrict A's usage, that the BitTorrent is reduced first, followed by the web surfing, with the VoIP disrupted only if there is no other choice to get A to within the allowed threshold.