On Tue, Apr 11, 2000 at 11:50:02AM -0700, Nevil Brownlee wrote:
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.
I didn't read the original comment as meaning that it was not possible to gather statistics from network traffic -- the point, I think, is that once you have those statistics, it's not obvious how to attribute value to them (I thought the "it" referred to the "value", not the "traffic"). A charging scheme that attributed value to volume of traffic, for example, would place all the value in the content consumer - content supplier relationship with the content supplier (since there would be a nett traffic volume inbalance in the direction supplier -> consumer). A charging scheme that attributed value to the direction a request was made (in an attempt to produce an analogue with the PSTN, for example) might place more value on the content consumer. Any such scheme ignores the symbiotic nature of the relationship between consumer and supplier, and leaves itself open to arbitrage, to the detriment of the industry as a whole. After all, who would _want_ to interconnect with a web farm that provided no client access, if the basis of interconnect was payment for nett bytes transferred? The number of services running across the PSTN is nice and contained, so that once you have a way of attributing value to a small number of services (local, toll, 0800, 0900, operator services, etc) it is relatively straightforward to make an agreement on interconnect. By comparison, on the Internet subscribers of the network are free to invent their own services without the interconnecting networks knowing anything about them. Hence any simplistic (and non-zero-settlement) charging regime imposed by network operators and based on aggregate traffic measurement is doomed to failure -- _that's_ what I thought the paragraph was referring to. Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog