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[ NNSquad ] Re: Selected comments on the FCC case 

let me just take up one point about abuse.

If you were protecting against DOS, I would agree. If you are protecting against email spam, I would agree that it makes sense for you to do that for the email service that YOU offer but that deep packet inspection to detect spam at the packet layer is not appropriate nor perhaps even desired by subscribers to email services other than the broadband ISP's. For example, I use coxnet cable but email service comes from others. I would not like coxnet to examine my email traffic to "protect" against spam. I would expect to get this service, if desired, from my email service provider.

vint


On Feb 14, 2008, at 10:14 PM, Brett Glass wrote:

At 07:45 PM 2/14/2008, Vint Cerf wrote:

Brett,

It seems to me that the remarks below seem to be based on a mis- statement of the neutrality debate. I don't thank anyone in the
neutrality corner is saying you can't manage your network. 

Vint, I wish that were true. But many of the remarks I've seen, both
on-list and off, do say that. I've been told (emphatically!) by
several folks on this mailing list that I "cannot":

* Monitor for abuse, including spamming;

* Throttle P2P, even if it generates traffic that amounts to a
  denial of service attack on the network;

* Operate a transparent Web cache;

* Post informative messages in users' browser windows (we used to
  use "pop-ups," but they're now routinely blocked by all of the
  major browsers);

* Detect "bots" or "zombies"; or

* Prioritize VoIP.

They are not saying you cannot allow prioritization. 

Actually, they are! Messrs. Reed, Karn, and Frankston, as
well as some others who are part of the group I've dubbed
"orthodox end-to-endians," have been particularly emphatic
about this. And Free Press, one of the two entities with
petitions before the FCC, is explicitly asking the FCC to
forbid any type of "discrimination" -- including prioritization.
See for yourself at p.38 of their filing. (Note: that's the
printed page number; it's page 42 of the PDF.) It's at

http://www.freepress.net/docs/fp_et_al_petition_fp_comments.pdf

They are not saying you can't charge more for higher capacity.

For the most part, no. But some are in one sense: They're saying that
when an ISP advertises "unlimited" (in terms of connect hours) access,
it means that the number of bits transferred should also be "unlimited."
No rational person would interpret the ad that way, but some folks
are nonetheless claiming that this is implied and that the advertising
is deceptive.

They ARE saying that these
services should be equally accessible to all application service
providers, where ever situated and that providers of the underlying
resource should not be able to use this situation to favor their own
application traffic over that of other application providers.


I've already stated (and stated in my comment to the FCC) that I'm in
favor of provisions that prohibit anti-competitive behavior. But
I'm not in favor of provisions that would force me to give free
upstream bandwidth to companies like Vuze and Blizzard, which
have a lot more money than I do already! (I'm a sole proprietorship;
that bandwidth comes out of my personal pocket.)

Users have a reasonable expectation that the broadband access they pay for
should give non-discriminatory access to any application service
provider. Note that this does not even say "equal access" since a
remote application provider may itself have capacity limits about
which the local broadband access provider can do nothing. 

What if the application provider installs servers at the ISP's site,
or receives services from a company (such as Akamai) that does?
(I'd always thought that Google might do this one day, by the way.
We wouldn't mind having a Google search accelerator in our NOC.)

--Brett Glass