On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Henning G Schulzrinne <hgs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The US regulatory process provides both individuals and organizations opportunities for input, both through written and oral contributions. Submitting a comment is easier than writing an I-D, as no XML is required, but there are deadlines ("comment periods") just as for I-Ds.From my experience, FCC staff are generally more than willing to meet individuals willing to provide technical information, particularly if they have done their homework and are not just shilling as for-hire experts. If you look at the citations in any major FCC item, you'll see plenty of references to individual faculty presentations. For various reasons, the faculty visiting the FCC tend to be law professors, rather than engineering, but that's mostly self-selection.
The risk of making a submission is being asked to help fix the problem...
And the fundamental issue here is that the Internet architecture does not have any concept of payment for transmission. It is assumed that everything is 'free'. While this solves a very large number of problems it also creates problems.
The telephone system has a very clear payment model in which the initiator of a call is responsible for payment over the wired network and the receiver bears the cost on wireless. That model simply does not apply to the Internet and attempts to apply it produce nonsense.
Settlements and interchange agreements are tricky. Especially so when the data streams are very one sided. But at the end of the day the consumer is paying their broadband ISP for the ability to connect to NetFlix and YouTube.
However, engineers should also realize that the high-order-bits of decisions are not merely technical. They tend to involve legal and economic efficiency arguments that are rarely clear-cut - they often involve predictions on how a decision will affect investment, competition, public safety and human behavior, among others.
Engineers are capable of understanding political and economic arguments! they just understand them according to a totally different ideological frame to the one the rest of the world lives in.
It's important to get the technical details right, but it's at least as important to recognize that this is not just (or even mainly) about the proper definition of IP addresses or "best effort(s)".
The proper definition of IP addresses is probably irrelevant. More critical is the understanding of the way that interchange agreements work.
I think there is also something of a problem with the advice some folk give. I was in a meeting where a very eminent IETF-er ranted about a 'nonsense' requirement that a part of the Federal Govt would like. A week later I had a solution worked out that did not cause any of the catastrophes claimed.
It is important to recognize that the 1980s Internet architecture was a pragmatic approach in which the answer to a lot of hard problems was 'we are not going to consider those right now'. Well now we have got to the point where they matter.