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

[Sally Floyd <[e-mail]>]

> 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.

- Sally
http://www.icir.org/floyd/