On 8/3/06, larry price <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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- _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
