Late on the game, but wanted to share some thoughts on Tommy's and Lorenzo's
draft on per-app networking (
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-per-app-networking-considerations ).
First of all, having a dedicated document that discusses per-app network
considerations and the implications with privacy and neutrality is great help,
as we can focus such discussion here and separate it from technical mechanisms
that try to offer solutions in these areas.
A category abstraction is definitely interesting and has its merits. With
regards to privacy, it reduces the information revealed to the network (subject
to generic enough categories). With regards to neutrality, it addresses - up to
a certain extent - concerns around user choice and competition (i.e., if all
gaming apps experience similar network behavior, there is not much competitive
advantage to be earned). With regards to implementation, if we assume there is
a centralized authority for categorization, there is potential to simplify
provisioning of such services across different administrative domains
(especially for E2E services like latency SLAs which would benefit from a
multi-domain enforcement). And with regards to incentives, it's necessary for
services where a pay-per-use model doesn't work well (e.g., zero-rating).
The big challenge with category-based differentiation is definition and
enforcement of categorization. There is significant experience from Europe's
zero-rating implementation, where regulators approved category-based
zero-rating, and more than 30 network operators implemented it (based on DPI).
In my experience, a decentralized approach (where each operator defines
categories themselves, and enforces them through a heavyweight implementation
process like DPI) doesn't work well, especially for smaller apps that don't
have the resources to work with operators, and end-up being in a bigger
disadvantage when their large competitors participate in such programs. As a
reference point, we've seen 10% success rate and 8-months average integration
time for an eligible music streaming company to participate in Europe's music
zero-rating programs, when the most popular apps were available in most of them
from the very beginning (more details on this here).
A good step forward would be to define a metric around time/cost to
participate, and what advances would help reduce this. Tommy/Lorenzo --- what
are your thoughts on category definitions? Have you seen any other paradigm we
could follow/re-use in terms of category definitions and eligibility? Could
Apple/Play stores playing a role in such an effort?
I think the document would benefit from explicitly mentioning incentives of
different stakeholders, and what mitigation mechanisms exist to align
incentives with protections of privacy and neutrality. For example, a gaming
zero-rating category incentivizes operators to ensure that only "gaming
traffic" would go through there, otherwise there is an incentive for users/apps
to mark their traffic as gaming to get a free ride. In contrast, in a
low-latency category operators can use a pay-per-use pricing structure, and
therefore not care much about what traffic goes over it.
In that direction, another approach to mitigate neutrality and privacy
considerations (especially for pay-per-use types of services like QoS) is a
user-based approach. The only thing that needs to be communicated is the desire
of a user to forward a packet through a certain path. In that sense it can be
application-agnostic, and therefore address all concerns around both privacy
and net neutrality.
I see that the document has expired. Is there interest to continue the effort
in follow-up meetings?
Best,
Yiannis
Yiannis .
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