Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?

[gordslater at ieee.org (gordon b slater)]

 inline...

On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 22:15 -0700, George Bonser wrote:
> The problem I have with the concept is that paid prioritization only
> really has an impact once there is congestion.  If your buffers are
> empty, then there is no real benefit to priority because everything is
> still being sent as it comes in.  If you have paid prioritization, there
> is a financial incentive to have congestion in order to collect "toll"
> on the expressway.  So if I have a network that is not congested, nobody
> is going to pay me to ride on a special lane.  

That's a serious problem that came up verbatim in an overheard (#1)
conversation yesterday. The bean-counters (who must, unfortunately,
remain nameless) coined the phrase "fill your buffers and fill your
boots". 

I was left with the distinct unsavoury impression that they were drawing
up a (contingency) plan for that exact eventuality. 

> I believe a network should be able to sell priotitization at the edge,
> but not in the core.  I have no problem with Y!, for example, paying a
> network to be prioritized ahead of bit torrent on the segment to the end
> user but I do have a problem with networks selling prioritized access
> through the core as that only gives an incentive to congest the network
> to create revenue.
> 

+1, because anything other than that Paid-Edge-Prio(#2), to me, smells
of theft, fraud, and frankly, B-S. 

IANAL
Gord

(#1) on a comletely unrelated topic, twisted pairs could possibly great
mike leads, don't you think? <cough>
(#2) you heard it here first. Like wise, Paid-Core-Prio. Hey, I could
patent-troll this stuff :)

--
$ cowsay paid-prio

( rip-off )
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