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In general, your error is to concede a point that's larger than the regulatory kerfuffle, namely that the Internet is an internet because of its end-to-end behavior. By endorsing that view you lend support to the regulators, who simply have to show that they can prevent the ISPs and carriers from owning the FCC to be successful.
In fact, the FCC has come under the effective control of Google and other content mongers in recent years, who have essentially a 1.000 batting average in terms of convincing the regulator to adopt their program. The Internet is rapidly becoming a network optimized for ad sales, and that's a much bigger threat to innovation than the optimizations that carriers need to make to service plans and peering agreements to turn it into a network that supports innovative non-content-related applications.
The "stupid network" construct is fine for content, not so fine for real-time communication. This point needs to be made clear to regulators less they subtract value from the Internet to mollify the angry mob of consumer advocates, law professors, and professional telco haters who clamor for more and better constraints on network operators.
Tim … how do you respond to Richard’s alternative interpretation of the Net’s technical underpinnings?
As far as the nitpicking goes, if you examine the Internet with a powerful enough microscope, you'll find stuff that could be plausibly described as non-neutral routing behavior. It's true, for example, that routers employ a variety of low-level optimization techniques that don't quite measure up to the ideal of completely neutral routing. However, I think this is missing the forest for the trees. Throughout its history, what has made TCP/IP different from other networks has been that it has been more decentralized and offered end users fewer guarantees than competing networks. Many partisans for other networks regarded this as a weakness, but of course it worked out pretty well.
As Richard would know if he read my paper carefully, my advocacy of end-to-end isn't a dogmatic opposition to any sort of routing optimization, nor am I even opposed, in principle to network owners offering prioritized services, although I'm skeptical that will work very well. Rather, I think the fundamental question is who will be in control: users or network owners. I think that any prioritization scheme that gets implemented should respect the end-to-end principle in the sense that the prioritization levels should be set by end users, rather than networks themselves trying to calculate the appropriate priority level using techniques like DPI.
I give a couple of quotes from prominent network engineers who don't believe that end-to-end prioritization if feasible on a network the size of the Internet. Richard apparently disagrees with them. I'm not an expert on network architecture, so I'm not going to make a strong statement either way on that, but at a minimum I think we can say that a lot of people have talked about adding prioritization to TCP/IP networks and we have yet to see anyone deploy it at Internet scales.
Huh? Look at the IP header. It has had a Type of Service field from Day One, out of respect to the diverse Link Layer networks that offer a range of delivery services. Network peering agreements are free to honor this field or to ignore it as they see fit, and the same goes for MPLS, another technique for specification of flow specfications. And we have a similar technique in IPv6, called "Flow Label Specifications."
So there's no doubt that traffic classification and differential treatment has been part of the Internet Architecture from the beginning (even ARPANET had it before TCP/IP was invented.) The actual issue is to what extent it's ever been part of Internet Operation, something that doesn't actually flow right out of architecture. The architecture permits a wide range of operational strategies, and network operators decide which to use.
There is an active debate inside the router protocols community about how much QoS the current revision of BGP actually permits. There are a number of things that are done in BGP that are suboptimal from the scaling perspective but necessary, such as muti-homing. But I digress.
I'm not nit-picking when I say e2e is less important than n2n. The big pushers of e2e are lawyers and other non-technical people who couldn't describe BGP if their lives depended on it, but BGP is actually the key to the modern, open, commercial Internet.
And on the other point, that's what happens when you do your research on Wikipedia. Stanislav Shalunov reported some ten years ago that the Cisco 7500 slowed down a hell of a lot when it had to enforce DiffServ, no big revelation when you consider that it did DiffServ in firmware rather than in hardware. Modern routers can do DiffServ at wirespeed, so that objection has long since been irrelevant. Last I heard, SS was working for BitTorrent, Inc, btw.
Which brings us to the problem with over-provisioning as a method of achieving QoS (not an alternative to it, but as a means to the end of providing a statistical guarantee of low latency delivery.) That method only works if there aren't applications standing in wait that can consume all the bandwidth added to the Internet and its access networks. When bulk data transfer on the Internet was confined to gentlemanly ftp and disks were expensive, it was a plausible argument, but it's not any more. The Japan data tells us that the more bandwidth a provider adds, the more is consumed by P2P as a percentage of overall volume. Bummer.
That's the danger of backward-looking tech policy, Tim. People who write rules are always fighting yesterday's war with the tools of tomorrow. It's best not to justify their quixotic quest.
My main point is that there's a real danger in e2e exceptionalism. Real networks allow the e2e layer and the n2n layer to communicate and negotiate with each other. The NN platform argues that such negotiation is always harmful to the consumer and must be prevented at all costs. You essentially agree with them on this point, and only quibble about the need to prevent it with regulation.
All they have to do to win the argument is to show that negotiation is taking place, and then we all lose. That's the problem I noted in my first comment on your paper - the point you concede is the critical one. Negotiation is good, we don't need a wall of separation between end-users and network providers.
I think you're choosing a hyper-technical meaning of "network neutrality" that doesn't accurately reflect the concerns of actual network neutrality advocates. I don't entirely blame you for this, since they seem to have difficulty agreeing among themselves about what they mean, but I also don't think you're likely to convince anyone by throwing up an impenetrable wall of technical jargon.
You betcha.
I just don't like the idea of needing to pay for a service on the net, and then add another item/region whatever to my service plan with my provider so it can get to me from some other segment of the internet (which is where this leads)
My values are this: I want my costs up front, and one time. I'm fine with paying for a level of of service for a specific technology (such as VOIP), but once I do I don't want to have to keep adjusting things when my friends move or change their provider. Pay for the service, not pay for whom I get to talk to using the service.
(and I've used VOIP as an example but you can extend this to any technology, and "I" could probably be replaced any individual or a business and I suspect that unless they own part of or are paid by a service provider they'll agree)
That's the relevant point on values.
It's simply a matter of opinion which is the key, and the opinion on the e2e side is relatively uninformed.
Tiered service (analogous to different shipping options), or having the content provider pay for some or all of the extra bandwidth necessary to deliver the content quickly (analogous to a "shipping special"), is perfectly reasonable and isn't "non-neutral" at all. In fact, prohibiting these practices would be "non-neutral," because it would bias the Net toward a particular business model that favors certain parties at the expense of others.