I think you should have shared the message from our public relations agency
that started this incident, Russ. Here's what it said:
------------------
IETF Chair speaks on Paid Prioritization - Thursday, September 2, 2010
"I note the recent discussion in the U.S. media in connection with 'paid
prioritization' of Internet traffic and the claim that RFC 2474
'expressly contemplating paid prioritization.' This characterization of
the IETF standard and the use of the term 'paid prioritization' by AT&T
is misleading. The IETF's prioritization technologies allow users to
indicate how they would like their service providers to handle their
Internet traffic. The IETF does not imply any specific payment based on
prioritization as a separate service."
Melissa Kahaly
Assistant Vice President
<http://www.fd.com/>
88 Pine Street, 32nd Floor
New York, NY, 10005
T +1 (212) 850-5709
F +1 (212) 850-5790
M +1 (732) 245-8491
www.fd.com<http://www.fd.com/>
A member of FTI Consulting Inc.
-----------------
This clearly isn't Russ Housley speaking as an individual, this is the IETF
Chair making an official statement.
The statement is misleading as RFC 2474 neither *implies any specific payment*
nor *denies any specific payment*. RFC 2475, RFC 2638, and RFC 3006 are plenty
clear on the relationship of technical standards to commercial arrangements.
And yes, the Architecture RFCs are classified as "Informational" but that
doesn't stop the Proposed Standards from referencing their "requirements" as RFC
3246 does:
"In addition, traffic conditioning at the ingress to a DS-domain MUST ensure
that only packets having DSCPs that correspond to an EF PHB when they enter the
DS-domain are marked with a DSCP that corresponds to EF inside the DS-domain.
*Such behavior is as required by the Differentiated Services architecture* [4
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3246#ref-4>]. It protects against
denial-of-service and theft-of-service attacks which exploit DSCPs that are not
identified in any Traffic Conditioning Specification provisioned at an ingress
interface, but which map to EF inside the DS-domain."
[Footnote 4] Black, D., Blake, S., Carlson, M., Davies, E., Wang, Z. and W.
Weiss, "An Architecture for Differentiated Services", RFC 2475
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2475>, December 1998.
I don't have any desire to limit Russ Housley's free speech rights, but it's
clear from all the evidence that he approached the press as the Chairman of IETF
with a statement to make about the argument between AT&T and Free Press, and
it's the statement in the official capacity that bothers me. I wouldn't take up
the IETF's time with a personal disagreement between Russ' interpretation of
DiffServ and anyone else's, but this issue is clearly far beyond that.
Finally, the term "paid-prioritization" wasn't coined by AT&T, it comes from the
statement by Free Press that AT&T was criticizing. In Free Press' usage it means
any departure from FIFO behavior for a fee.
RB
On 9/7/2010 3:52 PM, Russ Housley wrote:
Richard:
Russ said to the press that he considers AT&T's belief that the RFCs
envisioned payment for premium services implemented over DiffServ or
MPLS to be "invalid."
This is not what I said. I said 'misleading.'
The letter from AT&T jumbles some things together. AT&T makes many
correct points, but in my opinion, a reader will get a distorted
impression from the parts of the letter where things get jumbled.
Adding to this situation, it is clear to me that the term "paid
prioritization" does not have the same meaning to all readers. If you
read the AT&T letter with one definition in your head, then you get one
overall message, and if you read the letter with the other in your head,
then you get a different overall message. I tried to make this point.
This was captured pretty clearly in the article by Eliza Krigman:
| The feud boiled down to what it means to have "paid
| prioritization," ...
As I said on Friday, I made the point that DiffServ can be used to make
sure that traffic associated with applications that require timely
delivery, like voice and video, to give preference over traffic
associated with applications without those demands, like email.
Unfortunately, it is not simple, and I said so. I used an example in my
discussion with Declan McCullagh. I think that Declan captured this
point in his article, except that he said 'high priority', when I
actually said 'requiring timely delivery':
| The disagreement arises from what happens if Video Site No. 1 and
| Video Site No. 2 both mark their streams as high priority. "If two
| sources of video are marking their stuff the same, then that's where
| the ugliness of this debate begins," Housley says. "The RFC doesn't
| talk about that...If they put the same tags, they'd expect the same
| service from the same provider."
Clearly, if the two video sources have purchased different amounts of
bandwidth, then the example breaks down. However, that is not the point
in this debate.
Russ
--
Richard Bennett
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