[e2e] New approach to diffserv...

[Sean Doran]

"David P. Reed" typed :

| When I put a letter in the mail, the post office also has no control over 
| what I send, and does not know how valuable this particular letter 
| is.   Why should the network provider?

This is only locally true, and not in all circumstances.

Send a bit of mail to a country whose post office routinely
collaborates in opening mailed items for customs or law-enforcement
purposes, for example.   Or send a bit of mail or to a busy "v.i.p."
who has staff doing triage on incoming postal mail.

Moreover, most post offices *will* sanction you if it detects
that you've violated its TOS, and the detection mechanism
does involve sniffing your mail (sometimes literally).

Postal mail *is* gatewayed by middlebox analogues.  It's just that
the deployment of them is no more universal than the deployment of
middleboxes in the Internet.

Good luck with end-to-end encryption into gobbledegook
to a correspondent behind a hostile post office, or
behind a secretarial pool.  You'll need it.

| It is apparent to me that this kind of thinking is contaminated by a crazy 
| notion that the user/customer must serve the provider's needs. 

I don't see how that follows.   Middleboxes are usually
deployed at the site/provider border on the site's side,
and thus are the responsibility not of your provider,
any intermediate provider, or even their provider,
but rather the site in which your correspondent is located.

| Here is where your real philosophy comes out.   I suppose AOL is right in 
| saying that they ought to decide whether what people send each other in 
| email is acceptable or not.

Should you happen to have a houseguest some day, would
you completely waive your right to control what that
houseguest causes to be brought through your front door?

Do hoteliers have all their right to control what
gets brought through their front doors -- or room doors -- eliminated
just because they are being paid by their houseguest-analogues?

	Sean.