But would it work?

H.

As I said I don’t see what “neutral” means, especially given SLAs. As poptones already pointed out you can set up an SLA to fine-tune your QoS with your provider any way you see fit. This seems to be not “neutral” (I’m not even sure what a “neutral” position is in this case anyway) from the get go. It certainly doesn’t seem like something I would want to see go away. And if you’re transporting “big packages”, again, as poptones already stated, then it would appear that your costs should be proportional to your “weight”.

Perhaps I’m not getting something, but I think we are in agreement.

Really.

Poptunes is telling the truth here.

It seems pretty obvious to me this is exactly what the telcos are wanting to do with, say, google and yahoo video – to make the fat services pay them each month for the added traffic they create. You may think the fat services are already doing that now – they pay x dollars each month for peering and why should they have to pay twice? But what you may not know is that they – unlike me, and unlike the people my small startup serves – do NOT pay for the “gigabytes” they use each month: all they pay for is the peering, for example to connect their megabadass cluster proxy to this peering point in Arlington or San Francisco. After that it doesn’t matter if they spew a trillion bytes a day or ten, they pay the same fee.

Making the companies that contribute the largest amount of traffic to the internet – or the companies that need the highest qos and priortity in packet switching – gives them added incentive to, like google, build out their own networks that can operate in parallel with the others. That may not mean laying fiber, because that’s expensive and there are right of way issuesd and other stuff they may not want to screw with. So maybe they instead put more distributed caches across the country at smaller and smaller peering points giving even greater granularity of service, and then use the “standard quality” service to distribute to all those proxies. Either way the end result is the same: more fat content is removed from the major long haul routes, freeing up more of the existing pipes for the “little guys,” and the telcos still make more money because, ultimately, they control the majority of the peering hub connections.

Yahoo and google and the CC are against this for the same reason: to protect their bottom line. They don’t want to invest in the networks and they don’t want to pay others to invest in the networks – it’s like google joining my site and demanding I provide them flat rate bandwidth to help host their images – or better still, the CC comes demanding I provide flat rate video hosting for all their 700 club shows. What’s fair about that?

In the end it would appear that we all (content providers, content consumers, and network providers) will just need to muddle our way to something that is workable for most cases. The alternative is the possibility of enshrining something into law that is simply unworkable, even it is well intentioned.

This point is closely linked to questions of structural separation. The technical reason IP favors data applications is that it lacks any universal mechanism to offer a quality of service (QoS) guarantee. It doesn�t insist that data arrive at any time or place. Instead, IP generally adopts a �best-effort� approach: it says, deliver the packets as fast as you can, which over a typical end-to-end connection may range from a basic 56K connection at the ends, to the precisely timed gigabits of bandwidth available on backbone SONET links. IP doesn�t care: it runs over everything. But as a consequence, it implicitly disfavors applications that do care. – Tim Wu, Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination in Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, Vol. 2, p. 141, 2005.

Two concepts have become confused: neutrality in the sense of the absence of a network bias toward or away from a particular class of services, such as real-time, and neutrality in the sense of the absence of a network operator bias toward or against any one supplier of a particular service. We should reserve the term “network neutrality” for the first, and use “service-priovider neutrality” for the second, but the terms have become so polluted by politics that neither one is useful any more.

Agreed, but I cannot, as well as you cannot choose just any old ISP with DSL; cable is the same. But your point is taken. If/when DSL and dial-up are on par with one another then choose away. Investigating the number of DSL providers in my area I have a pretty limited choice, and cable is simply out of the question because I host servers and my DSL provider is cool with that but the local cable monopoly isn’t.

What you are endorsing is NOT what you claim

I admit that it is probably not. Since I cannot control the thing being endorsed [Congress’ idea of NN].

what you are endorsing is no one can sell “the internet” unless they play by legislative code on how those packets are routed – well sorry champ, that’s just the foot in the door. Once you have law that says congress sets the rules of the internet, what’s to stop them from clamping down on any isps doing other things they don’t like? And how to enforce it? If congress can set the rules for packet switching, what happens when the DOJ decides to play on the sheeple’s braindead and ignorant resentment of “public nuisance” sites like Myspace, or the bazillion porn sites? They can set the rules for google and yahoo and the other megasites with Billions to blow on lobbyists, they can set the rules for everything else, too.

True enough. Independently I decided to see if I could work out some sort of meaningful “definition” of what NN could be, certainly one that is compatible with existing business practices as embodied by SLAs and I couldn’t. Therefore, I rescind my previous statement of support for NN as the idea is inherently unworkable.

I like my freedom just where it is: my own hands. If that’s too much responsibility for you Bellsouth and the various religious focused ISPs will be glad to take responsibility for you – they’ll even charge you less for the priviledge of steering you clear of the “bad sites” and protecting you from your own weaknesses. I, however, have no desire to be forced to play by the rules you decide, nor especially to subsidize such tyranny with my own labor and tax dollars.

Same here.

All you’re endorsing is step one on the road to the great firewall of amerikka.

Not any more.

And that’s exactly what we have: I have a DSL modem for which I paid a whole 70 bucks, and I am free to choose any ISP that plays by any rules I see fit. If I want to go with an ISP that filters out for me any naughty packets I am free to do so; if I want to use windows and play by bellsouth’s rules I cna do that; I choose to pay a small premium for an ISP that leaves the responsibility for my own freedom up TO ME.

What you are endorsing is NOT what you claim; what you are endorsing is no one can sell “the internet” unless they play by legislative code on how those packets are routed – well sorry champ, that’s just the foot in the door. Once you have law that says congress sets the rules of the internet, what’s to stop them from clamping down on any isps doing other things they don’t like? And how to enforce it? If congress can set the rules for packet switching, what happens when the DOJ decides to play on the sheeple’s braindead and ignorant resentment of “public nuisance” sites like Myspace, or the bazillion porn sites? They can set the rules for google and yahoo and the other megasites with Billions to blow on lobbyists, they can set the rules for everything else, too.

I like my freedom just where it is: my own hands. If that’s too much responsibility for you Bellsouth and the various religious focused ISPs will be glad to take responsibility for you – they’ll even charge you less for the priviledge of steering you clear of the “bad sites” and protecting you from your own weaknesses. I, however, have no desire to be forced to play by the rules you decide, nor especially to subsidize such tyranny with my own labor and tax dollars.

All you’re endorsing is step one on the road to the great firewall of amerikka.

So we see, net neutrality means there can only be one service level on any broadband network, ever. All other definitions of net neutrality are obsolete, so if you support the concept on the basis of some other definition, forget it. This is what the net neutrality law actually says.

Nobody in their right mind could possibly support it, regardless of how they feel about Fair Use, Gay Marriage, or Al Gore’s movie. It’s simply insane.