AT&T made a claim this week in a letter to the FCC that has agitated Internet Engineering Task Force to no end. The company claimed that the Internet standards group gave "its blessing to ISP priority access deals way back at the beginning of it all."
AT&T claims that in the late 1990s the IETF added the "DiffServ field to the Internet Protocol (a networking architecture that specifies a scalable mechanism for classifying and managing network traffic) to facilitate paid prioritization as a means for encouraging the further growth and development of the Internet."
In its letter to the FCC, AT&T said that paid priority was always planned for, throwing around terms like "fully contemplated" and "expressly contemplated." But the current IETF chairman is not on the same page, calling AT&T’s characterization of history misleading.
"AT&T’s characterization is misleading," Russ Housley told National Journal this week. "IETF prioritization technology is geared toward letting network users indicate how they want network providers to handle their traffic, and there is no implication in the IETF about payment based on any prioritization."
The problem for those that disagree with AT&T’s assertions is that the framers of those standards were intentionally ambiguous, leaving the details to system operators. Here’s a bit from an excellent Ars Technica report on the history of Diffserv related to a 1998 IETF Request for Comments document (RFC 2475):
"Service differentiation is desired to accommodate heterogeneous application requirements and user expectations, and to permit differentiated pricing of Internet service," 2475 explained. Who is responsible? that last sentence is pretty much AT&T’s historical gold mine, but was that reference to "differentiated pricing" a recommendation or just an observation? And what did these RFC writers mean by it? And for whom? For business enterprise customers whose users want certain kinds of traffic fast-tracked within an Intranet? or did they mean AT&T telling The New York Times that if the newspaper pays the carrier a regular fee, the telco will make sure that its DSL and U-Verse customers can access the nytimes.com online edition more quickly and easily? Beyond the quote, AT&T’s missive to the FCC doesn’t offer much, so it keeps tunneling back into the past, as if adding more words will bolster the point. AT&T notes that RFC 2474 cited RFC 791, legendary Internet architect John Postel’s Internet Protocol specification guide, which outlined IP’s Type of Service parameters. "if the actual use of these precedence designations is of concern to a particular network," RFC 791 explained, "it is the responsibility of that network to control the access to, and use of, those precedence designations." And in the DiffServ environment, service providers "are free to configure the node parameters in whatever way that is appropriate for their service offerings and traffic engineering objectives," 2474 adds.
"AT&T’s projection of the RFC authors’ intent is misguided," CDT argued in a letter to the FCC countering AT&T’s arguments. "while differential pricing may certainly be used in conjunction with DiffServ, other than the single phrase selected by AT&T, the entirety of RFC 2475 is dedicated to describing the technical architecture needed to deploy differential services—not the payment schemes that may be associated with it."
ars technica, assertions, framers, managing network, request for comments
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