[e2e] layered neutrality & end2end

Jon Crowcroft Jon.Crowcroft at cl.cam.ac.uk
Wed Mar 8 08:25:55 PST 2006


So Vint Cerf gave a cool talk at Google in London last night...

Lots of nice examples of the way things will probably head :- 

In the Q&A afterwards, one thing no-one really asked much about 
(there was 1 question about governance that hinted at it) 
was neutrality - 

It seems to me that the sort of arguments we have about once per
nano-year on this list, about lack of end2end transparency 
can be applied at any layer 
(actually, this was the topic of the edge and near edge
middleboxes ctl debate a few years back in the IETF) :-

So telco-style ISPs would love to remove net transparency 
for users via differential charging for the QoS and security 
services.  They charge you more for add-ons like jitter&delay
bounding for VOIP (essentialyl by disabling it for others :- 

Fact is that since most people with enough capacity for X will use X, 
for any X={audio/video/game etc), there cannot be _any_ internet or 
router scale mechanism that it makes sense to turn off for a minority 
of users for) that actually realy saves any significant real resources
imho.

Anyhow, so net neutrality is a cool thing, 
but what about transport and application layer neutrality? 

So google's defense for running the
great firewall of China is that 
they already do one of these for everyone else :-
(e.g. no holocaust denial websites in austria, 
no pictures of naked men in the UK, 
no pictures of English food for French users, 
you get the idea) 

Of course, we can build an overlay around that...
As in the argument that the Internet will evolve 
to route around any damage to e2e 
(e.g. do NAT traversal, RON to policy route etc), 
the web will evolve to route around any differential 
search engine results etc etc....maybe....

discuss:-

cheers
j.
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