[ih] history of net-NON-neutrality

[Dave CROCKER]

> <http://alexmckenzie.weebly.com/comments-on-kleinrocks-claims.html>

This is, of course, entirely off the intended topic -- hence the new Subject 
line -- but I was struck by a bit of text that covers a point, which does not 
seem to get cited about the history of special handling for Arpanet/Internet 
traffic:

> 3. The ARPANET was expected to have a bimodal traffic distribution, with most
> messages either quite short or quite long.  It was envisioned that the short
> messages would be interactive traffic for which minimizing delay was most
> important, whereas long messages would be data transfers for which maximizing
> throughput was most important.  The ARPANET design allowed one bit of
> "priority" information for each message (e.g. high or low priority).  The
> network designers imagined (or at least allowed for the possibility) that
> interactive traffic would be marked high priority and data transfer would be
> marked low priority.

I am trying to get people to distinguish between "service neutrality" which 
pertains to protocols, versus "participant neutrality" which pertains to actors 
including users, organization and hosts.

The quotation from Alex's column reminds us that there was always some thought 
about being non-neutral with respect to services.

d/


-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net