On Tue, 30 Aug 2005, J. Oquendo wrote:
/* ARTICLE Does the model still work? I'm not sure. In my view, the biggest concerns facing the Internet today are regulatory and operational, rather than technical. For example, how do we encourage providers to respect each other's QoS tags? Is it acceptable for providers to censor traffic for competitive advantage? Should providers be required to devote some of their revenues toward services "for the common good," such as universal Internet access? */
Not only that how many large providers are willing to take a hit in the pockets getting everything running the way it should be run. Why should they when they could do some shoddy patchwork until the next big hit.
It's more than just that. The article excerpt above mentions:
For example, how do we encourage providers to respect each other's QoS tags?
This part is *not* regulatory in nature; it's financial. QoS is still (even today) a lucrative market. Why would Tier-1 A care to carry packets from Tier-1 B at a higher priority than anyone else's, unless Tier-1 B paid more $$$ for the privilege? If regulation were to step into this market, you'd have the entire industry crying foul. The other way round, however:
Is it acceptable for providers to censor traffic for competitive advantage?
is indeed a regulatory issue. For the most part, Tier-1s and other providers high up the food chain don't filter because doing so is (1) too much of a load on switching hardware, (2) too much risk of violating peers' or downstreams' contracts, or (3) both. The issue of traffic filtering is much more prominent with the small-fries and leaf networks. These two rhetorical questions are pretty clear. Unfortunately, the dividing area between regulatory and non-regulatory issues is a deep gray, and it's much broader than most netizens realize. -- -- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>