This is interesting for many reasons but we should be clear that the capability to delivery different levels of service priority and bandwidth to individuals is different from the ability to charge for service delivered. Legislation about what is fair or equitable should be driven by the market conditions especially as network costs are very significant requiring constant investment to maintain customer satisfaction. And of course we haven't talked much about end to end service delivery yet but I believe it will happen ! In the UK I see users very willing to pay for differentiated services. This is quite amazing as a great deal of ISPs use BT's wholesale product where its not viable to deploy their own. However the differentiated service plans are still available and the vigorous market conditions drive prices and as a consumer I change as regularly to get best price vs speed vs cap.... Personally this is almost worse than having no choice ! Chris -----Original Message----- From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Worley, Dale R (Dale) Sent: 03 September 2010 14:30 To: Ofer Inbar; IETF Subject: RE: My comments to the press about RFC 2474 ________________________________________ From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ofer Inbar [cos@xxxxxxxxx] P.S. My neighborhood is about as far from being a tech backwater as it is possible to be in the world. Yet I still have only one viable option for high speed Internet. It's a business & law problem, not a technology problem. _______________________________________________ It's a traditional monopoly problem. Market-based mechanisms don't work if there isn't vigorous competition. The traditional solution is "common carrier" regulation of "natural monopolies". At the least, we need to define data carriage as a "common carrier" business, where the carrier must provide service on a non-discriminatory basis at published rates. (Whatever happened to the dream of multiple WiMax providers?) Dale _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf