gregh 2008-01-17 10:10
Obviously, it's a bit tough to answer the question without defining net neutrality, and that's one whole panel on the discussion. However, what set me down this path was the following on the symposium's front page:
Should Internet Service Providers continue to drive the same “neutral” course, giving all search requests and other uses of the Net equal treatment? Absent legislation, will these ISP’s create Internet “toll roads,” giving preference to certain types of information? It is these types of questions that are at the heart of the debate on Net Neutrality.
I deleted what became a critique of this notion, that somehow this hasn't always (at least in modern Internet times) been done. All uses of the Internet have never been given equal treatment. Have you ever been able to get your transit provider to get multicast to you? Are you on the MBONE? Does your protocol use UDP, because it's generally deprioritized in favor of TCP. What if you want to run an autonomous network with multiple routes via BGP, but you can only secure a class C? No good, because: a) you're not going to get it; and b) no one is going to accept your routes. What if you've built your own backbone and you want super-fast interconnectivity? Think the big guys are going to peer with you unless you've got something to offer? Ten years ago, what if you ran a second-tier backbone and didn't want to interconnect with UUNet and BBN at a public peering point. Too bad, because the big guys weren't going to give you good private peering, so you, your customers, and your applications would lose packets in one direction or another.
And that's just the easy ones off the top of my head.