ftth,
I began drafting a response to this excellent post of yours back in December, but it went off into entropy somewhere. But this was classic ftth. Kudos!
That ISPs would be called upon to determine what is lawful and what is not is not in their purview. It demands that they perform deep packet inspection, for one thing, and it also presumes a level of oversight and authority that they do not possess. Furthermore, it imposes a burden on them for which they will never see any compensation, which would have the effect of putting additional undue stress on their financials at a time when they can least afford it.
That said, the simplest way for an incumbent to 'degrade' service is to simply let traffic build up and not do anything about it. No capacity adjustments, no route tuning, no filtering of spam (or lessening it), etc. When these lapses occur the worst effects of the 'best effort' model become apparent, and those who pay for prioritization can still get through unscathed.
But what if traffic doesn't increase to those levels? The incumbents aren't going to leave anything to chance, which is why we see the beginnings of other assurances being implemented, such as IMS. Who knows what path to the future this set of specifications will take, if gone unchecked? I don't. But this much I do know: There's an awful lot to those specifications to allow anyone who wanted to seriously become pro-actively restrictive toward users who refuse to come up with the vig.
FAC |
