Re: [Tsvwg] Re: terminology issues in draft-floyd-tsvwg-besteffort - flat monthly pricing

[dimitri papadimitriou <[e-mail]>]

bob

you wrote:

"so there won't be sufficient incentives for anyone to invest in more 
capacity for those of us who want to use the Internet responsibly."

this might be indeed a concern

but as shorter life socialist ;-) i do also strongly believe that before 
discussing the solution space we should first within the IETF community 
at large come with a good, clear, and common understanding whether this 
is a concern or not, if this is the case how important & urgent it might 
be, have better understanding about of some of the root causes, etc.

-d.

Bob Briscoe wrote:
> Sally,
> 
> I just realised that I should have added a very important point about 
> "who controls the choice" to the rather philosophical response below.
> 
> I'm trying to make sure we at the IETF don't have to decide whether the 
> Internet more favours rich people, malicious people or selfish people. 
> I'm trying to make it so what you think or what I think about this 
> doesn't matter (at least any more than what everyone else in the world 
> thinks).
> 
> Firstly, what I'm proposing would sit alongside the current Internet 
> (re-ECN packets are distinguishable from non-re-ECN packets, so they 
> effectively partition all traffic orthogonally to Diffserv).
> 
> Secondly, one partition would be the current Internet, with all its 
> vulnerabilites to selfish and malicious users as well as all its 
> strengths. The other partition would be this new proposal where the 
> market and social governance can control the way the Internet shares out 
> resources.
> 
> At a grander level, the choice of how much resource each of the two 
> partitions gets would be under the direct control of ISPs, but in turn 
> their choices are also affected by the market and perhaps by social 
> control through government regulation.
> 
> I know this fits your preferred model of how new resource allocation 
> strategies should be added to the Internet. The question is whether it 
> is sufficiently important to use IP header space to provide this choice. 
> We don't need to decide that now, but we do need to debate it widely - 
> more widely than tsvwg.
> 
> 
> Bob
> 
> At 18:16 24/07/2007, Sally Floyd wrote:
>>> 3/ User pricing: Flat monthly (in our simplest effective proposal).
>>>
>>> Please don't imply we're advocating user congestion pricing, given 
>>> the whole reason we brought re-ECN to the IETF back in 2005 was 
>>> because we found a way to limit congestion without constraining how 
>>> operators price their services to their customers. Specifically, 
>>> re-ECN is designed to work with flat monthly pricing.
>>
>> This draft is not about re-ECN.  It is about the usefulness of
>> "simple best-effort traffic", and the usefulness of flow-rate fairness
>> for simple best-effort traffic.
>>
>> This draft is not about the presence or absence of flat monthly
>> pricing for users.  One could have flat monthly pricing with no
>> other limitations, one could have flat monthly pricing with volume
>> limits, or one could have flat monthly pricing with some form of
>> "you get what you pay for".  The first two forms don't result in
>> "rich" users getting all of the bandwidth in times of high congestion
>> (e.g., after the earthquake).  The third form easily could.  E.g.,
>> if all of the traffic was "you get what you pay for", even with
>> flat monthly fees, then it could be really expensive to send packets
>> in the time interval after the earthquake, or some other highly-congested
>> period, and only the rich would be able to send packets.  I would
>> be opposed to setting such a "you get what you pay for" goal as the
>> overriding goal for the global Internet, with or without flat monthly
>> fees.
> 
> I know. It's distasteful to me to (I am a life-long socialist). But the 
> alternatives are worse. I have thought about this long and hard.
> 
> On the demand side: If the rich don't get to be able to buy the right to 
> use capacity, the alternative is that the malicious and selfish get to 
> drive out those trying to be sociable in their use of the Internet. And 
> that's for always, not just during earthquakes. Also, the lack of any 
> resource sharing arbitration will lead to a vacuum that will be filled 
> by the rich and powerful (which is what deep packet inspection 
> represents - those with power and influence controlling what can and 
> can't be done on the Internet).
> 
> On the supply side: The malicious and selfish will use the Internet 
> excessively, but not pay their share, so there won't be sufficient 
> incentives for anyone to invest in more capacity for those of us who 
> want to use the Internet responsibly.
> 
> In summary, a knee-jerk reaction against a market mechanism needs to be 
> tempered by the thought of what will otherwise fill the vacuum - the 
> lesson of the Soviet Union?
> 
> However, you will notice in my draft on fairness (and in my design of 
> re-ECN) that I have been careful to enable more equitable resource 
> allocation schemes locally. This can give _true_ equality, whereas flow 
> rate equality is just a license for the selfish and malicious to take 
> what they want.
> 
> Overall, I put my hands up and admit it: we don't have a better system 
> for allocating resources on planet scale than a market. I wish we did. 
> We do have better resource sharing capabilities locally though, and I 
> want to enable them.
> 
> 
> Bob
> 
> 
>> - Sally
>> http://www.icir.org/floyd/
> 
> ____________________________________________________________________________ 
> 
> Notice: This contribution is the personal view of the author and does 
> not necessarily reflect the technical nor commercial direction of BT plc.
> ____________________________________________________________________________ 
> 
> Bob Briscoe,                           Networks Research Centre, BT 
> Research
> B54/77 Adastral Park,Martlesham Heath,Ipswich,IP5 3RE,UK.    +44 1473 
> 645196 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .
>