Hello Frank:
The study is now known as ICAIS (for: International Charging Arrangements for Internet Services). An interim report has been prepared for the ICAIS Task Force. The report concludes inter alia that about 90% of the costs of Internet connection for Pacific Rim countries is due to the local loop, about 7% is national backbone and a mere 3% is due to international link costs (however the consultants who wrote the report consider this is still considered sufficient to justify further work).
I haven't seen the report, and I'm surprised that the local loop part of the cost is so high. Still, the ICAIS consultants have presumably arrived at this figure by talking to ISP in various of the 'member economies,' so I guess we (and ICAIS) have to work with it. In which case, I agree with you that there seems little point in governments trying to interfere. Concerning your para 10 and 11:
10 The impact of Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) needs to be taken into account. At this stage of technical development and with the declining relevance of ITU SG3 recommendations on international telecommunications traffic (accounting rates), we would not want to see any arrangements that imposed unjustified compliance costs or that endeavoured to mandate negotiations that would subject Internet traffic to similar costing regimes as voice telephony (for these reasons, New Zealand has not supported active ITU-T involvement in Internet charging arrangements either).
This is very important. We certainly don't want governments imposing a regime which would force ISPs to do PTT-style charging for voice calls over the Internet - that would severely limit the development of voice, video, multimedia, etc. technologies over the Internet.
11 The task group must avoid any outcomes where the cost of measurement or monitoring exceeds the cost/value involved. Unlike telephony, the Internet is not measurable in terms of traffic flows: the flows themselves do not indicate where the value of traffic lies, even if you could measure it.
I strongly disagree with the throw-away line "even if you could measure the traffic flows." There are many ISPs world-wide who DO measure traffic flows - using technology such as Cisco's NetFlow, or NeTraMet/NetFlowMet - and there IS a proposed Internet Standard for it (RFC 2720). You should delete that last phrase, particularly since you've already made the point about the cost of measurement being significant. Having said that, I agree that the value of the Internet isn't measurable just in terms of traffic flows - but that's a subjective, value-laden statement, which makes it harder to defend. Maybe you could add an example or two to make the point more strongly? Along the lines "the Internet allows much more varied styles of remote interaction than voice telephony, which greatly ehnaces the abilitiy for groups of people to work together despite being located in different economies" ??? Cheers, Nevil ------------------------------------------------------------- Nevil Brownlee Visiting Researcher Phone: (858) 822 0893 CAIDA, San Diego --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog