[ih] history of net-NON-neutrality

[Richard Bennett]

  That note got my attention too. I think the answer is to stop using 
the term "neutrality" to describe networking policy preferences. It was 
coined by a law professor with a limited understanding of networking 
(Tim Wu, once worked for a router company in a marketing role before law 
school) and it confuses people to no end. I think the net neutrality 
people want to ban vertical partnerships between network operators and 
content concerns; if that's the case, they can just say so and get a 
sympathetic ear. Vertical partnerships on networks are pretty toxic in 
political circles.  So that's a winning cause.

But if want to ban QoS, they're going to have much less support and very 
strong opposition. If they want to regulate the sale of QoS (not ban it, 
but regulate it), fine and dandy, our governments regulate all kinds of 
things. But banning QoS is nonsense.

QoS actually makes networks more "open" because it allows a more 
heterogeneous pool of applications to run successfully. Neutral traffic 
management makes networks less "open" because it narrows the pool of 
successful applications.

RB

On 9/15/2010 1:16 PM, Dave CROCKER wrote:
>
>> <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/
>
>

-- 
Richard Bennett