Posted by: Hank Hultquist on October 13, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Kudos to Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld for sharpening his lawyer pencil and addressing some of the legal issues around the (apparently) fascinating issue of “paid prioritization.” In a recent blog post, Harold explained how, under Title II, the FCC might approach various business models that include payment for prioritization.
Harold’s basic point was that the FCC might either permit or prohibit particular instances of “paid prioritization” based at least in part on decisions the FCC has made in the past. I agree completely on this point. Contrary to the title of Harold’s blog, I don’t think anyone at AT&T has said that Title II would “require” the FCC to permit any and all practices that include both payment and prioritization. But, if someone has, then he or she should go back to common carrier school.
What I and others have said is that under Title II the FCC could not a priori (for some reason lawyers like Latin) ban all practices that may combine payment and prioritization, since in the past they have allowed some practices that do so. Under Title II, carriers would be free in the first instance to offer such services and concerned parties would be free to challenge them. At which point, the process Harold describes would kick in and the FCC would have to decide whether the service in question is “unreasonable,” or “unjustly and unreasonably discriminatory,” yadda, yadda, yadda (or blah, blah, blah, as Harold prefers).
Read More 
Posted by: Hank Hultquist on September 2, 2010 at 12:37 pm
As discussed in my last blog, for many years proponents of extreme versions of net neutrality regulation have fulminated against the practice of “paid prioritization.” In a recent series of letters, Free Press argued that the Commission should in no circumstances permit ISPs to be compensated for the provision of “router-based prioritization,” and that such prioritization is not taking place today.
At the time, Free Press was responding to a letter filed by the Minority Media and Telecom Council that urged the Commission not to adopt a blanket ban on payment for prioritization. According to MMTC:
“Today, when [businesses] sign up for Internet access service, many of these businesses also enter into voluntary arrangements with their broadband providers for the provision of enhanced quality of service capabilities as part of their Internet access service as well as other specialized offerings. These agreements allow [businesses] to identify a portion of their traffic as requiring better than “best effort” handling. This capability allows these businesses to ensure that the performance sensitive applications that they wish to run, such as VoIP or IP-based video conferencing, receive the service quality needed to function properly.”
Free Press responded at the time by insisting that such compensation arrangements were inconceivable under the IETF documentation for Differentiated Services (DiffServ).
Yesterday, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative (OTI) basically endorsed the practice described by MMTC. According to OTI: “[t]he intended purpose of DiffServ is user-driven differentiation of traffic.” It would seem that Free Press owes MMTC a clarification.
Read More
Posted by: Hank Hultquist on August 31, 2010 at 11:22 am
One of the central dogmas of the Church of Extreme Net Neutrality (CoENN) is that quality of service on the Internet, or using the preferred nomenclature of the CoENN, “paid prioritization,” is the equivalent of a deadly sin.
The CoENN creed against quality of service states that paid prioritization of Internet traffic: (1) has never been contemplated by standards organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); (2) does not exist on the Internet today and, to the extent it exists anywhere, is probably being used nefariously by the pagans; and (3) if it did exist on the Internet, it would be available to and affordable for only a small number of deep-pocketed hegemons.
These iniquities of paid prioritization are spelled out in a recent filing at the FCC in which Free Press preaches the old time religion of the dumb network. But, like so many dogmas, this one turns out to be, well, not exactly true.
Which leads me to the letter we filed yesterday in the FCC’s Open Internet proceeding to correct the record with respect to paid prioritization. In a nutshell, we point out that, contrary to the CoENN’s claims: (1) the IETF documents clearly contemplate and permit differentiated pricing of Internet traffic based on the use of prioritization; (2) paid prioritization of Internet traffic is widely available to businesses today; and (3) such prioritization is often voluntarily purchased by small and medium-sized enterprises, including minority-owned businesses and community organizations.
Read More
