For people interested, there is a discussion of the roots of the "network neutrality" concept at internetpolicy@elists.isoc.org Some of it seems, to my eyes, to be uninformed by the community that works in the AQM space, so I see perfectly serious quotes like > > Longer packets might be dropped in favor of shorter ones. Packets > in a > burst might be dropped in favor of ones that are spaced out. > > This gets back to the point of neutrality - which describes some > level > of "equivalence", but there's never just one version of > equivalence that > everyone will accept. > > If you want to preserve the Internet architecture, you need to > make sure > that: > > Packets shall not be discriminated except on their inherent > properties (size, time of arrival) or explicit user-inserted > label (e.g., a QoS tag). > > If you want to make sure that packets are "fairly dropped", > there's no > single such thing; one link might be bandwidth limited (so drop > proportional to length is fair), and the next might be header > processing > limited (so per-packet drop is fair); for a given path, there's no > single mechanism that satisfies the variety of fairnesses that > could be > required. > If anyone's also interested in Network Neutrality and its roots, please feel free to hop over and contribute some informed opinions (;-)) --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb@spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain