Re: Latest Development in DiffServ Wars
2010-09-10 17:55:44
Fortunately, Housley's not as recalcitrant about correcting errors
as some hardheads would like. See this article from today, relevant
portions highlighted.
RB
Housely: IETF Has Taken No Position On AT&T
Prioritization Assertions
Though group chairman personally thinks AT&T has
"jumbled some things together"
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/10/2010
10:54:17 AM
Public interest groups including Free
Press and Public Knowledge have called on AT&T to retract a
letter to the
FCC that said the Internet standards-setting body IETF (Internet
Engineering
Task Force) had "fully contemplated" paid prioritization, with the
groups saying IETF disputed that assertion. But Russ Housely,
chairman of the
IETF, says that is not the case, though he said he personally thinks
AT&T
has "jumbled some things together."
Paid prioritization is one of two key
issues on which the FCC is seeking more comment before it proceeds
with its
effort to expand and codify network openness principles.
In AT&T's
letter
it said Free Press was confused about paid prioritization in its own
letter.
AT&T has said that paid prioritization was contemplated by IETF,
is already
widely available from multiple providers, and is used by small
businesses as
well as the handful of giants Free Press says benefit from it. In a
blog
posting Thursday, AT&T SVP Bob Quinn, who signed the FCC letter,
defined
that prioritization as "providing customers the option of purchasing
a
higher quality of service."
Public Knowledge, Free Press and others
issued a release this week headlined "Internet Engineering Task
Force Says
‘AT&T Is Misleading' on Net Neutrality." They argue AT&T is
blurring the line between paid prioritization, which Free Press
defined as
"speeding up and slowing down" Internet traffic according to who
pays
more, and "accepted business-class network management practices."
The call for a retraction came after
Housely told the National Journal that the AT&T letter was
misleading.
"IETF prioritization technology is
geared toward letting network users indicate how they want network
providers to
handle their traffic, and there is no implication in the IETF about
payment
based on any prioritization," he said.
But Housely says he was speaking for
himself, not IETF. "I want to be clear that I was speaking as an
individual when I spoke to reporters last Friday," he told the
magazine in
an e-mail. "The [public interest group] press release says: 'The
IETF,
however, disputes AT&T's claims.' The IETF has not taken any
consensus
position on this matter," he said, adding in a follow-up e-mail:
"[T]he IETF produces technical specification for the Internet. The
IETF
does not make statements about prices for network services."
Compromise language being hammered out
by industry representatives, including AT&T and the National
Cable &
Telecommunications Association, on a legislative path to clarifying
the FCC's
Internet access oversight authority is likely to include an
agreement that paid
prioritization of service should be allowed, but with assurances
that such
prioritization does not come at the cost of the robustness of the
"public
Internet."
Housely says the "jumble"
comes from the meaning of "paid prioritization. "[I]t is clear to me
that the term "paid prioritization" does not have the same
meaning to all readers," he told B&C.
"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."
Housely told B&C that AT&T in
its letter makes "many correct points"--he did not specify which
they
were--but that it also "jumbles some things together." "[I]n my
opinion, a
reader will get a distorted impression from the parts of the letter
where
things get jumbled," he said.
The problem, Housely says, is that the
IETF specification at issue is not about "prioritization," but
about
quality of service. "Different applications need different
things from the
network to deliver a quality experience," he said. He used as an
example
of giving preference to "traffic associated with applications that
require
timely delivery, like voice and video, over traffic associated with
applications without those demands, like email."
Housely says the debate is not about
that, but about what happens if, say, two video sites both mark
their packets
of info for timely delivery. "If two sources of video are marking
their
stuff the same, then that's where the ugliness of this debate
begins,"
Housley told the Journal. "The RFC doesn't talk about that...If
they
put the same tags, they'd expect the same service from the same
provider."
That would be the difference between a
tier of service where everyone was treated equally in that tier, and
one in
which one company could pay to have its service get priority over
another similarly
situated company expecting equal treatment.
"Clearly, if the two video sources
have purchased different amounts of bandwidth, then the example
breaks
down," Housely told this magazine, again, speaking for himself.
"However, that is not the point in this debate."
Asked to respond to Housely's
clarification that his criticisms of AT&T were his opinion, not
IETF's,
Free Press's Derek Turner, was undeterred: "Nothing changes the fact
AT&T
was caught red-handed misleading the Commission by conflating the
harmful
practice it agreed not to use as a condition of its merger with Bell
South,
with widely recognized legitimate network management practices.
"Housley
is an independent expert in his own right and his opinion is backed
up by
several independent sources and engineers."
Asked about Housely's
"jumbled" reference, AT&T referred the magazine to its original
letter to the FCC in which it outlines the IETF RFC (request for
comment)
language on which it bases its conclusion that the IETF had meant to
"facilitate paid prioritization as a means for encouraging the
further
growth and development of the Internet."
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/456906-Housely_IETF_Has_Taken_No_Position_On_AT_T_Prioritization_Assertions.php
On 9/10/2010 3:43 PM, Bob Hinden wrote:
On Sep 9, 2010, at 4:46 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
There are two possibilities here:
1) The Press Release is accurate in its representation of the IETF
No action is required
2) Someone on the Internet is wrong
That never happens! Maybe the IETF should start a working group to insure that all information on the Internet is correct :-)
Bob
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