Legal Niches

AT&T: Net Neutrality & Rewriting History

By james_fudge

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. Read More

read more

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on September 10, 2010 (boomark / email).