[governance] What is Network Neutrality

[Ralf Bendrath]

Parminder schrieb:
>> whoever rents a faster pipe can get faster upstream for his service,
>> even based on different qualities (latency, jitter, pingback, maybe
>> even number of hops, ...).
> 
> That is a violation of NN, as long as we are talking about transmission
> over the (public) Internet.
I was talking about access.

The transmission over the backbones depends on which peering agreements my
ISP has etc. There is no thing such as the "public" internet in this sense
- it's all private contracts between different autonomous systems and with
the owners of the "tubes". Of course, one can debate which kinds of
principles we would like to establish to ensure the backbone traffic is
not discriminating against specific content etc.

>> We may see more price differentiation in the last mile market and a 
>> movement away from flat fees
> 
> As mentioned a few times earlier I do not consider access pricing (for
> the size of the pipe) as an NN issue.
And why would this not apply to the backbones as you mention above? Now
you confuse me.

> Quote from Obama's technology policy doc.
> 
> (...) carriers are tempted to impose a toll charge on
> content and services, discriminating against websites that are
> unwilling to pay for equal treatment. This could create a twotier 
> Internet in which websites with the best relationships with network 
> providers can get the fastest access to consumers, while all competing
> websites remain in a slower lane.
As I said, this debate is over, as also McTim has confirmed. Maybe someone
here wants to apply for an advisory position in the Obama adminstration? ;-)

But before we go too deep into the fuzzy and potentially outdated
formulations of a specific candidate who won an election in one specific
country, can I ask the million Euro question?

"What are the global public policy implications of all this?"

Ralf

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