Thursday, September 25, 2003
More on Cloudshield
Andrew Odlyzko writes that application-level price discrimination
" . . . is really equivalent to letting the carrier be vertically integrated and controlling everything. After all, if you control pricing, you control everything."But Odlyzko doubts that looking inside every packet (a la Cloudshield) will provide a feasible basis for price discrimination. He continues:
"The only place that there is some argument for fine-scale control (and so where tools [like Cloudshield] might possibly take hold) is at the edges. It really boggles the mind to see anyone seriously imagine that (i) a backbone could really effectively examine/classify/price/control the millions of flows it handles and (ii) that even if this was technically feasible, it could be done in what is necessarily a small commodity business where the access carriers would have no interest in allowing the backbone carriers to do this."He comments,
"I don't think this is all that scary. Silly is more like it."Well I dunno. I'm aware of at least one research program on how to use the data that Cloudshield makes accessible, and it is funded by "the U.S. government," (further details withheld (from me)). Such research might decrease the silly factor in the near future.
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