[governance] Re: caucus contribution -> possible replacement terms for NN?

[Roland Perry]

In message <20130213202010.45e1fa92 at quill.bollow.ch>, at 20:20:10 on 
Wed, 13 Feb 2013, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> writes
>“How to maintain the principle (sometimes referred to as ‘net
>neutrality’) that the price which an ISPs charges their customer for
>exchanging data packets via the Internet shall not depend on the
>content of the data packets, nor on who specifically is the remote
>party? What shall be the mechanisms and institutions involved in this
>process?”

I'm not sure I know of any ISP that charges their consumer customers 
different rates for different types of packet.

What happens is either:

Packets are blocked completely, and no amount of money will make them 
flow; typical examples include email (port 25) traffic to other than the 
ISP's own mail relay [as a Spam prevention technique] and Usenet traffic 
[to discourage swapping pirate movies via Usenet].

or:

The total number of packets (per month, usually) is limited, but you can 
buy more packets if you want; typical examples include Mobile Phone data 
[limited to perhaps 1GB/month] or ADSL/landline [limited to perhaps 
50GB/month], the effect in both cases being to make it *appear* that 
very high volume traffic is more expensive, but they don't count 
streaming-movie packets differently to email packets or web browsing 
packets. If you have to buy more packets, the email and web browsing 
ones cost the same as streaming movie ones.

If the statement above is referring to the *hosting* customers of ISPs 
(eg YouTube versus Wikipedia), it should specifically say so. It's also 
an out of date model because many large hosting companies act as their 
own ISPs, have their own connectivity to IXPs and so on.

If there was going to be some discrimination between types of traffic 
exchanged at IXPs, that would be a matter for the peering agreements 
between the large hosting companies and the onward transit and consumer 
ISPs present at those IXPs. This would be controversial territory - 
proposing to regulate peering agreements.
-- 
Roland Perry

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