Net Neutrality

This topic may be a bit old, but I was just thinking about it again for some reason.

On one side we have the large ISPs and network hardware companies like Cisco that oppose net neutrality. They say they should be allowed to prioritize traffic, giving voip, iptv and such higher priority over regular web traffic. This certainly makes sense. After all, we don't want hiccups in our phone calls, tv, internet radio, or whatever else might appear.

On the other side we have the content companies like google and yahoo that want net neutrality. Their argument is that the ISPs could (would) prioritize traffic based upon where it comes from and whether or not that site has paid for better service. They're worried about getting double charged, once for internet access and a second time to insure that access to their sites are not slowed down in favor of someone else's. Of course this would affect small startups even more since they could not afford to pay. This is obviously bad.

The solution currently currently going through committees is to treat all internet traffic the same. While I certainly prefer this to having no protection it will likely cause problems for real time and near real time traffic like voip. The best solution would be to allow traffic types to be prioritized but not on a site by site basis. All voip traffic is treated the same, all http traffic is treated the same. This would be the best of both worlds.

Pan Update

It's certainly been a while since my last post. Anyone interested in pan should already be aware that official development astarted back up some time ago. Several betas have been released, and i expect to see several more before version 1. Since the new version solves most of the issues that prompted development of the database version I've stopped work on my branch.