[Rpm] net neutrality back in the news

[rjmcmahon]

Common Carriage goes way beyond our lifes. Eli Noam's write up in 1994 
is a good one.

http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/wp/citi/citinoam11.html

Beyond Liberalization II:
The Impending Doom of Common Carriage
Eli M. Noam
Professor of Finance and Economics
Columbia University, Graduate School of Business
March 15, 1994

I. Introduction 1

This article argues that the institution of common carriage, 
historically the foundation of the way telecommunications are delivered, 
will not survive. To clarify: "common carriers" (the misnomer often used 
to refer to telephone companies) will continue to exist, but the status 
under which they operate -- offering service on a non-discriminatory 
basis, neutral as to use and user -- will not.

...

VII. A Contract-Carrier Based Telecommunications System?

The conclusion of the analysis has been that common carriage will erode 
in time, and that a hybrid co-existence will not be stable. This is not 
to say that the common carriers qua carriers will become extinct; many 
of them will remain significant players, but they will conduct their 
business as contract carriers. But common carriage as such will 
disappear. This will not happen overnight, of course. Intermediate 
arrangements can buy several decades of transition time. But the basic 
dynamics will eventually assert themselves.

This conclusion is reached with much regret, because the socially 
positive aspects of common carriage are strong, and because the absence 
to common carriage often means gatekeeper power. But we should not let 
preferences obscure the clarity of analysis.

Bob
> Jason just did a beautiful thread as to what was the original source
> of the network neutrality
> bittorrent vs voip bufferbloat blowup.
> 
> https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/1707078242857849244
> 
> Seeing all the political activity tied onto it since (and now again)
> reminds of two families at war about an incident that had happened
> generations and generations before, where the two sides no longer
> remembered why they hated each other so, but just went on hating, and
> not forgiving, and not moving on.
> 
> Yes, there are entirely separate and additional NN issues, but the
> technical problem of providing common carriage between two very
> different network application types (voip/gaming vs file transfer) is
> thoroughly solved now, and if only all sides recognised at least this
> much, and made peace over it, and worked together to deploy those
> solutions, maybe, just maybe, we could find mutually satisfactory
> solutions to the other problems that plague the internet today, like
> security, and the ipv6 rollout.
> 
> If anyone here knows anyone more political, still vibrating with 10+
> years of outrage about NN on this fronts, on one side or the other, if
> you could sit them down, over a beer, and try to explain that at the
> start it was a technical problem nobody understood at the time, maybe
> that would help.