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[ NNSquad ] Re: Irish Times: "A modest proposal on internet neutrality"

Lauren Weinstein wrote: 

1) Confusing RFCs that are explicitly "informational only" with IETF
   standards is sloppy and not recommended.

2) Dan Bricklin's essay: "Why We Don't Need QOS: Trains, Cars, and
   Internet Quality of Service" is still very good reading:
   http://bit.ly/bL1W1J  (Dan Bricklin's Web Site)

I found Bricklin's essay interesting, but was bothered by the lack of either hard data or a well-founded mathematical model to back up his assertions and figures.

My own view is that there may be some role for carefully crafted
QoS -- but that a) it's critical that it not be capable of being unfairly
"gamed" - b) its use should be as limited as possible - c) if used at
all, it should generally apply equally to all traffic of the same class - d) you should not be able to "buy" higher priority for arbitrary
data across the public Internet - and e) I'd much prefer to see bandwidth capacity increases avoid the need for QoS at all.

I'll reassert my proposed solution: each customer is allocated up to X amount of "high priority" traffic per time period (second? minute? hour? month? -- maybe different levels for each?), up to Y amount of "medium priority." The user chooses which packets will have what priority (well, actually the application chooses, but the user chooses which apps to use). If a user tries to exceed his allocation, his "high priority" traffic is automatically downgraded to "medium" and then to "low".

This is, I believe, self-correcting. Yes, BT can try to "game" the system by marking its packets high priority -- except that after the first few Kb (in a second) or GB (in a day or month), those packets will be downgraded. And if the user is trying to use VoIP and has a BT client using up his high-priority allocation, he'll see really lousy performance on his VoIP. Then he calls up support and is told, "Your BT(*) traffic used up your high-priority allocation. If you'd like to uninstall that, I can then give you a temporary allocation so your voice traffic (or gaming traffic) will work better.:"

(*) Or whatever app is trying to game the system for more bandwidth -- and the chances are the ISP can figure out what app that is, either by looking at the packets as they go by, or by traffic analysis.