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[IP] more on lets read the spec Verizon "Broadband Router"



Begin forwarded message:

From: Jason Weisberger <jweisberger@xxxxxxx>
Date: July 2, 2006 3:18:43 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] lets read the spec Verizon "Broadband Router"

Bill,
You are right on here. Network Neutrality is becoming such a media and celebrity darling it is scary. Telcos are not trying to redirect everyone who wants to use Yahoo to MSN due to a sponsorship. They want to sell higher quality services for a premium. I bet if we took these same Celebs who are pro-net neutrality and told them they had to wear the same K-Mart and Target clothes as the bulk of their audience, they'd have a fit.
Lets look at POTS (Plain old Telephone Service) - everyone in the US is supposed to have a basic "lifeline" level of service that'll reach out to Emergency services. Then for a basic rate, you get basic local calling and can select a long distance provider.
For Internet, there is a basic rate of service, that you can select that gets you access to most everything on the internet (impacted mostly by how BGP-4 is being implemented between your ISP and all the ISPs in the path you want to take.) 

If you want call-waiting on your POTS service, you can pay extra for it.
ISPs want to be able to sell you HD quality video on demand, if you elect to pay for it.
Where this becomes tricky for Big Content is that they want to sell you video on demand and they don't want their infrastructure provider playing in the same league. They want the ISP to give them the ability to sell it, but not sell it themselves - or at the very least they want the ISP price regulated (net neutrality.)
All the fairness of reach and "they'll block your favorite sites" chatter is just misleading. I've never once heard it suggested by a Telco that they'd just block YouTube in favor of Google Video and redirect all the DNS.
Over a decade ago the Internet was allowed to go commercial. It is now a platoform for commercial exchange and the infrastructure needs to be run, more or less, as a business - just as the businesses who use the internet need to be run. Government regulation does not have a history of helping business run efficiently. We do, recently have a history of needing to bailout failing telecoms and in a previous post I explained why I feel big Content is at least a major character, responsible in part for the failures. 

Jason Weisberger
http://www.bother.com <- blog
jweisberger@xxxxxxx <-email
http://www.federatedmedia.net <-work



On Jun 30, 2006, at 5:36 AM, David Farber wrote:




Begin forwarded message:

From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 29, 2006 8:54:30 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@xxxxxxxx>, dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: more on Verizon "Broadband Router" the perfect Trojan Horse 

David Reed fundamentally misreads the TR-069 standards document.
As far as I can tell, while it's written with the usual clarity
of a telecom standard designed by a committee with multiple goals,
it is *not* a design in which
- the user wants to read arbitrary web sites using a browser
- the router watches all the IP packets,
        deeply inspecting the protocols wrapped inside the
                HTTP or HTTPS layer inside the TCP layer
                inside the IP layer
        and redirects packets directed to some sites
- the ACS control system tells the router what to redirect.

In fact it appears to be a design in which
- the user wants to change features of their network service,
        or get their router fixed if it's broken, etc.
- browsers are the tool that everybody uses to talk to users
        (for instance, my home wireless and wired routers
        both use browsers as their interface)
- some of the changes require communicating with the router
        to set parameters, reboot the router, etc.
- some of the communications can be done by the ACS control system,
        but some of them can only be done from the user's LAN,
        either for security reasons or because something's wrong
        with the router or whatever.
- the user can browse to the ISP's web site,
        give the service provider information (upgrade requests,
        account numbers, etc.),
        get information such as activation codes or firmware URLs,
- the web site can redirect the user's browser to send that
        information to the router, which can do something direct
        or connect to the ACS for more instructions, etc.

In fact the whole Network Neutrality debate is filled with
people who don't understand the technology (including people
who should, and people on multiple sides of the debate)
extrapolating terrifying possible outcomes of various things,
ranging from Censorship by the Telco/NSA/Disney/Bush cabal
to the Death of Consumer Service Innovation Strangled at Birth
by the Red Tape of Astroturf-Driven Regulation.

If an ISP _wanted_ to control user web-browsing behavior,
it'd be much simpler and more cost-effective to do it centrally,
using DNS servers, transparent proxy and caching equipment,
PPPoE tunnels, and similar tools.
There are ISPs who do some of this, not for nefarious purposes,
but typically to quarantine virus-infected users and zombies
so that they can only access virus-cleanup sites,
or else to redirect users who haven't paid their bills
to the ISP's online billing site.

                Bill Stewart

Disclaimer: As usual, this message is entirely not intended
to speak for my employers, current or past,
and it's also not intended to speak for the TR-069 standards
committee.

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