Grad Student thesis rsrch one page: comments welcome ;) however I have my good comments filter on... Is Internet Reachability a Net Neutrality Issue? ----CRTC Chairperson Konrad von Finckenstein introduced Net Neutrality in his speech to the 2007 Broadcasting Invitational Summit and again at the 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit mentioning that the CRTC's New Media Initiative will include "striking a social, cultural and economic balance to deal with Internet traffic prioritization". ----Traffic prioritization or traffic shaping is a small part of the entire concept of a neutral network. ----The internet has no minimum standard of acceptable performance for reachability of websites and data. As an information tool it becomes useless without this reachability addressed as far as possible. ----The most famous example of non-neutrality in Canada occurred during the Telus labour dispute (2005). Telus blocked access to a pro-union site by blocking the server on which it was hosted. Researchers at Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Toronto (OpenNet Initiative) found that Teluss actions resulted in an additional 766 unrelated sites also being blocked for subscribers. Dealing with blocking access to servers and blocking access to other networks are very important aims of a neutral internet. ----Example: A York University professor was sitting at his desk at work in March 2008 trying to reach an internet website located somewhere in Europe. It was important to his research so when he repeatedly could not reach the site he contacted his IT department at the University. They were mystified why this would be the case. The Professor went home after work and found that he could reach the website from home consistently, for many days and was not ever able to reach the website from the University campus network.Yorks bandwidth supplier is Cogent which had severed a peering relationship with a bandwidth provider in Europe called Telia, which was the bandwidth network provider for the website that the Professor was trying to reach. However at home, the Professor purchased bandwidth from Rogers (and its upstream providers) who did not sever their peering relationship with Telia. Cogent did not proactively inform the University of the issue and the loss of connectivity. Unreachability due to arbitrariness in network peering is unacceptable. ----Parts of the internet become unreachable for a great many reasons such as line failure, cable cuts, misconfiguration of equipment and human error but to add significantly and deliberately to this unreachability due to arbitrariness in peering is unacceptable. End users whether award winning scholars, backyard astronomers or teenage scientists require as much reachability of data as the technology will allow. Political and economic persuasions should not be permitted to condition and alter the media or the content. ----Recommendation: Bandwidth purchase agreements (Service Level Agreements) that specify bandwidth, uptime and cost actually define connectivity thus they should contain a list of peers or network interconnections that will be maintained for the length of the agreement. Prepared by Nancy Paterson, York University July 23, 2008 nancyp@yorku.ca PS anyone willing to proof read a few technical pages of thesis paper? pls contact off list