How Would Two-Tier Internet Work?

[SOURCE: Freedom to Tinker, AUTHOR: Ed Felton]
[Commentary] The word is out now that residential ISPs like BellSouth want to provide a kind of two-tier Internet service, where ordinary Internet services get one level of performance, and preferred sites or services, presumably including the ISPs’ own services, get better performance. It’s clear why ISPs want to do this: they want to charge big web sites for the privilege of getting preferred service. I should say up front that although the two-tier network is sometimes explained as if there were two tiers of network infrastructure, the obvious and efficient implementation in practice would be to have a single fast network, and to impose deliberate delay or bandwidth throttling on non-preferred traffic. Whether ISPs should be allowed to do this is an important policy question, often called the network neutrality issue. It’s a harder issue than advocates on either side admit. Let’s think about the practical aspects of how an ISP would present the two-tier Internet to customers. There are basically two options. Either the ISP can create a special area for preferred sites, or it can let sites keep their ordinary URLs. Either option leads to problems.
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