You seem blind to the fact that Google games the net by caching their data all over the place and buying super-fast pipes. The AT&T scheme would partially nullify Google’s gaming, and make the Net more fair than it is today.

We can’t have that, can we?

BTW – Bennett seems to believe that anyone who opposes the pipes on this necessarily supports certain landgrabs by other parties. He’s wrong.

I do too, so what?

And more importantly, I’ve read the Markey and Snowe bills and I know they ban QoS.

You’re talking about another issue entirely, bandwidth-on-demand, a service offering that one Telco said they’d like to offer. I happen to thing that would be a good service too, because it might allow small servers to reduce the RTT gap with Google and Yahoo.

The Internet, you see, isn’t a level playing field today, because the guy with the fattest pipes and the best-located servers wins the RTT battle.

The pipes (telcos etc), on the other hand, are demanding something else, namely a cut of Google’s ad revenue. They’re not suggesting that they’ll provide more valuable service in exchange for said cut.

And, something in the above will prompt Bennett to call me a socialist.

Note that telcos, especially in a hot-pototo world, have limited ability to actually provide that.

Why? Because most packets traverse multiple vendors and actually delivering those things requires end-to-end coordination.

Bennett continues to ignore what the telcos actually say.

They say “Google is making a lot of money using our pipes and we deserve our share.” Google isn’t making that money on payloads that require special treatment – they’re just sending boring HTTP that can be adequately served with “best effort”, just as it has been for years.

As far as bandwidth goes, no one is arguing that a 10MB pipe has to cost the same as a 1MB pipe. Heck, the Telcos are free to charge by the bit (ISDN anyone). Of course, it would be nice if the pipes honestly reported their services. (I’m referring to folks who advertise “unlimited” and then throttle customers who download “too much”. Is it really too much to ask for them to say “6Mb and up to 6GB/month”?)

There are two kinds of service enhancements ISPs want to sell, and they’ve been conflated because the neuts are ignorant of modern network architectures (I include Cerf in that camp because he’s not been a practicing engineer for 20 years.)

A. Quality of Service enhancements, which reduce packet latency and jitter. This is not a bandwidth supplement, it’s achieved by reorganizing outbound traffic queues.

B. Bandwidth enhancements, which offer more overall throughput.

ISPs would like to be able to sell both enhancements either to their customer directly or to a third party who uses them to communicate with their customers. I don’t see this as especially evil, but it is a departure from past practice. Not a departure from “laws of the Internet”, just a departure from convention.

Meanwhile, in the real world we’re seeing content producers demanding payment from ISPs for their services, such as ESPN360. The neut movement is totally unaware of this practice. See George Ou for the lowdown.

Worried about a balkanized Internet? Fine, stop fighting yesterday’s war and fight the one that’s actually happening today. Or don’t, as the case may be.

I accept the fact that the world changes.

(Substantive) Bennett is an example of one type. Who wouldn’t want great new services and “more money, more bandwidth”. This is basically cost-based differentiation – services that are more expensive to host pay more.

The other opponents are proposing something very different. They say “Google makes money by sending bits over the internet, so I should be able to get a cut or keep google from getting to ‘my’ customers.” That is what the telcos are actually proposing. This is value-generated differentiation.

One important difference between the two is that the “value-added” folks are the ones who are actually making the proposal. We might get some cost-based differentiation, but the actual proposal is value-generated.

The cost of a three minute call from NY to CA is basically the same regardless of how much money is at stake. Why should the cost of 1k of HTTP data be any different?

Like I said, this is an issue fueled by fear and ignorance.

Your arrogance is a liability to your cause.

Before the week is out, they’ll have to manufacture a new “outrage” to scare the liberals.

Look, Jarvis, the reason net neutrality has no traction is because it’s a bogus cause based on nothing but fear and ignorance. There’s nothing wrong with an improved Internet with richer transport services, and it would be best for America if the know-nothings would kindly pipe down about it.

At some point, it may become necessary to add new regulations to ISPs but we’re nowhere close to that point today.

Until there’s some abuse, we don’t need new regulations.

http://www.p2p-blog.com/index.php?itemid=20

Craig Newmark will rebut tomorrow.