Doug Ross @ Journal

Internet2: "Why Premium IP Service Has Not Deployed (and Probably Never Will)"

After years of multiple failures to implement QoS -- using both reservation and priority-based (e.g., DiffServ, VLL) model on Internet2 -- I found this quote from the after-action report ("Why Premium IP Service Has Not Deployed (and Probably Never Will)") fascinating:

...in a Premium service world, making a customer that otherwise doesn't pay you directly switch from "free" (for transit customers) best-effort service to paid Premium service and have some money dribble through the payment system into your coffers seems too obvious a trick not to play... We expect that if Premium were deployed, providers would begin to treat the best-effort traffic of non-customers worse than the best-effort traffic of their customers. The erosion of best-effort service would lead to a completely different world where all serious work gets done over Premium service and users are generally expected to make virtual circuit reservations for most of what they do...

That assessment -- dated well before the current debate and authored by very smart networking people -- should send us all running into the net neutrality corner as fast as our little legs will carry us.