Congress releases draft broadband bill

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So what really is filtering?

It's really more insidious than simple filtering. It's a clear case when an ISP specifically filters out or intentionally degrades a particular service or protocol. It's not so clear when a provider negatively impacts a service or protocol as a result of legitimately prioritizing traffic.

In many cases it's not possible for a provider to have unlimited bandwidth to all locations. If that provider needs to prioritize specific traffic to ensure performance for a paying customer or class of customers, and that results in degradation of other services and protocols, does that constitute an illegal limitation on traffic under this type of legislation? What if they have their own VoIP service for which they have QoS settings that result in degraded performance for other VoIP services? Are they not entitled to ensure the best performance for the services they are selling? What if that QoS setting is to prioritize some video protocol or another particularly time critical application? If that impacts some other service does that constitute filtering that's prohibited? Is real-time gaming a protocol that is going to be protected? Should it be? It's a complex issue.

On the flip-side, what if a provider intentionally degrades another competing service using overwhelming prioritizing of other traffic? They could plan to have bandwidth limited (supposedly due to the cost of delivery) with the result being poor performance for the competing service. How do you determine this as being different from the above?

Isn't this a situation where market forces should determine the result? If the service doesn't suit them, they should go elsewhere.

Posted by: n8dnx   Posted on: 09/19/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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