[1520] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Alternate Routing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vince Fuller)
Mon Oct 21 22:20:29 1991
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 19:20:18 PDT
From: Vince Fuller <vaf@Valinor.Stanford.EDU>
To: sommerfeld@apollo.com (Bill Sommerfeld)
Cc: yakov@watson.ibm.com, steve@ncri.cise.nsf.gov, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 21 Oct 91 16:30:43 EDT
If you *really* want to use ToS to distinguish between "commercial"
and "noncommercial" traffic, you're really going to have to be able to
get *routers*, probably on the boundary between the mid-levels and
campus nets, to fill in the "appropriate" ToS bit in the IP header
while the packets are passing through.
It's really not possible to "fix" everyone's IP implementation at a
site to always set the bit on "appropriate" traffic, but it might be
possible to patch the router between a mid-level and a "pure"
commercial or academic net to set the appropriate ToS bits in traffic
received from specific nets or over certain interfaces.
- Bill
This is not a solution, since it is the content, not the source/destination,
which determines whether a given packet is commercial or not. The only entity
which can properly set the TOS is the user. The "easy" solution to this problem
is to use a special TOS bit (or combination) to indicate "commercial/research"
and modify each application to set the bit appropriately based on user input.
Again, the "easy" way to accomplish this is to make a special "commercial"
version of each application that sets the appropriate TOS bit (i.e. "ctelnet",
"cftp", etc.). Mail would be a special case, since its delivery is not usually
handled by the user agent - some sort of header scheme would need to exist.
I say "easy" in quotes since doing this creates a user education problem, but
we really already have that problem for sites which can originate both research
and commercial traffic.
--Vince
