North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Vonage Hits ISP Resistance

  • From: Bill Nash
  • Date: Wed Mar 30 23:20:31 2005 
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Jamie Norwood wrote:


On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:36:19 -0600, Chris Adams <[email protected]> wrote:

Once upon a time, Eric A. Hall <[email protected]> said:

Do you also block NNTP so that customers have to use your servers?

Change that to SMTP and you'll get a bunch of "yes" answers.  Why is one
right and the other wrong?

Heard of a little thing called 'spam'?
SMTP and NNTP are an apples / oranges comparison. Email is well nigh ubiquitous, when people think about the Internet. NNTP, like IRC, is a niche subset compared to HTTP, SMTP, and IM.

The long and short, is that popular services will remain largely unregulated, by ISPs or by government, until it's clear that they're being abused. Many ISPs did this with NNTP before they did it with SMTP, largely with the advent of higher speed connections facilitating shorter turnaround on warez traffic. Once spam took off, same deal.

If ISPs can't play nice with third party service providers, I predict things will get ugly. Regulators are already sniffing around, both locally and internationally. VOIP is quickly becoming a hot item, and anti-competitive tactics that limit or remove the consumers choices are going to be blood in the water for politicos looking for something to gnaw on.

Obviously VOIP needs QoS to function well on oversold, commodity broadband networks. Why not just paint VOIP with a broad QoS brush (as in, prioritize all of it, not just your own service) and defang the folks just looking for an excuse to step in and take the option away from you?

- billn