> The ISP is not your enemy. It is not your friend, either, but this > assumption that just about any active traffic management is somehow > bad, and that application-aware traffic management is always bad, > seems a significant limitation.
Nick, There is a fundamental, potentially very serious anti-competitive conflict between these large ISPs' roles as content providers, vs. their role as gateways to the external Internet (where services that directly compete with the ISPs' content provision aspects may be accessed). Unless concerns over this conflict can somehow be resolved, it is completely understandable that many observers would view the bandwidth allocation, tiering, cap, and other related decisions being made by ISPs with a considerable amount of suspicion. It doesn't help the situation that we've seen active lying by Comcast, intrusion by ISPs into customer data streams to manipulate and alter content, and experiments with wiretapping of actual user data without affirmative opt-in permission. There is every indication that many ISPs -- no longer willing to act "merely" as communication conduits -- are pushing the envelope as far as they can until suffering unacceptable amounts of blowback. The ISP industry is reaping the distrust that they themselves have been sowing. The ball is really in their court if they wish to achieve high levels of trust among their subscribers. In the meantime, our goal here is to help understand exactly what they are actually doing. --Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator
