[Foundation-l] H.R. 5252 and H.R. 5417

[Kelly Martin]

On 6/1/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I think in the specific case of the Wikimedia Foundation, it'll have
> negligible impact.  We're large enough and have little enough
> competition that the power balance tips more our way than their way---if
> Wikipedia is slower on one ISP than on one of their competitors, that
> will reflect badly on that ISP.  And in any case, latency caused by
> differential IP-traffic priority is likely to be negligible compared to
> latency caused by things like hitting the database.

We might care more if we were peering.  Since we pay for all of our IP
traffic as transit, it's unlikely we'd run into this issue.  The real
issue behind net neutrality is the desire of Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs to
give preference to customers who are buying transit (and who are thus
paying for bandwidth) over partners who are peering (and who thus do
not pay for bandwidth).  Most large providers (such as Google) carry a
substantial portion of their traffic over peering relationships,
thereby avoiding traffic charges, and the beancounters at the Tier 1s
see this as lost revenue.

Kelly