On 8/20/2010 2:15 AM, Harry Penner wrote: > I certainly understand your concern and agree that it's a legitimate > issue. But making it illegal for ISPs to consider the content of the > traffic can have costs as well. As the pipes become more congested, > will VoIP still be feasible without prioritization? Sure, you can > prioritize it on your own LAN and on your firewall, but if it gets > treated the same as telnet once it hits the big pipes how will it > sound in 2 years after every cell phone on earth is playing youtube > videos of lolcats? One solution is to build bigger pipes, but will > ISPs keep giving you unlimited data transfer for a flat fee if they > have to double their capacity and can't tweak the traffic to increase > perceived bandwidth? > > Actions have reactions: maybe regulation solves the content > discrimination problem, but it might directly cause or hasten other > undesirable outcomes such as the end of (or an increase in the price > of) unmetered home connections, or degrade VoIP performance (forcing > people back onto POTS lines or onto cell phones where we are already > seeing metered data), or make "free" Internet video conference calls > suddenly expensive or impossible, or who knows what. I've mostly skimmed through the posts here, so I may be a bit off, but I don't think the big issue is whether an ISP should be allowed to prioritize certain types of traffic, but rather whether ISPs should be allowed to control who can connect to whom. The fear is that ISPs will block connections to certain servers, either charging customers to connect to certain websites or charging website owners to connect to the customers on top of what they charge for bandwidth. In such a scenario, it's likely that prices go up and choices go down.