Ummm
Not often I look at comments (and the articles) on the reg and think to myself "wtf"
There is some serious confusion here about what we are talking about and they are all really separate arguments / discussion.
Two (or more tier networks) - deals between ISP and content providers / search engines / a another to provide faster service to them specifically - this is the original net neutrality argument, and rightly caused some consternation.
Traffic Engineering and management - wow...just wow - the fail here is epic - this has been ongoing for years and will continue to go on - the idea the human rights etc comes in to play is foolish in the extreme, in what is in essence boils down to a way of controlling traffic between delay and non delay sensitive types (and all the grey between).
Then there is quality assured management - where you pay a premium for guaranteed services (within an sane definition of guarantee) , again nothing shocking about this and in fact many people already do this perhaps without realising...
Finally all this has blurred into people who wish to pay for a dumb pipe that isn't actually at all dumb (only everyone thinks so because of the way clown's like BT and the ISP's, mobile or otherwise have marketed it) and in fact its the services you run that differentiate your usage, not the pipe. You want to watch real time streaming - well that's different from sending email or browsing HTTP...
This all boils down to away of pricing a system that allows people to get what they want, for what they want to pay - and the ideas espoused by some above where they seem to forget that without the bit in the middle there isn't actually a service, mystifies me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
