[Eug-lug] Mr Smith goes to Washington to address net neutrality

[Quentin Hartman]

On 8/3/06, larry price <laprice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Network Neutrality has several different definitions, the engineering
> definition is that the network doesn't care or know what the contents
> of a datagram are, just it's destination; by that definition the
> internet today IS NOT NEUTRAL, spam filters, firewalls and packet
> shapers all break the neutrality of the network, for good reasons.

And it's important to point out that the non-neutrality as it exists
now is controlled by the endpoints, not the carriers.

> The competing political definitions of Net Neutrality are mostly
> concerned with legalising anti-competitive behaviour so that the
> incumbent telcos can keep making money off their copper cable plant
> rather than competing on building out FTP (Fiber To Premises) networks
> (as they mostly received billions in public subsidy to do) . The thing
> is that legislation is probably the worst solution at this time, it's
> hard to write something that would be effective at achieving the
> desirable goals (competition on bandwidth and network quality metrics)
> without killing one or another industry segment (Akamai would be an
> illegal business under several of the proposals).

I agree that the proposals are pretty bad, but because the FCC backed
out of the common carrier regulation, something needs to be done...
Ideally, forcing the FCC to re-instate that regulation or legislation
that simply has a ssimilar effect would be best, imho, but of course
that won't ever happen via legislation with all the SPIGs getting
their riders tacked on...

-- 
-Regards-

-Quentin Hartman-