Your example doesn't make any sense. For purely technical reasons there would be no reason to send a VoIP call along with the "sideband feature" over the same connection.
Even if your VoIP application offers a feature like streaming file transfer, you wouldn't actually implement that by sending that data over the VoIP connection, because the VoIP data requires real-time performance (the call starts breaking up if packets are delayed) but your streaming file transfer does not. It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call.
If you simply opened a second, non-VoIP connection for the file transfer, everything would work fine.
Would Verizon have an incentive to cheat by favoring its own services? Maybe, but that seems to be what these Google talks are all about in the first place. I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply.
> "It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call."
1. I think it would be silly to assume a reasonable person would propose sending multi-gigabyte files down a VoIP connection. You might want to consider asking people if there was a miscommunication before assuming they're unreasonable or ignorant.
2. I thought the qualifier that it would remove the need to open a second app was sufficient to indicate that I was talking about opening a second app. Ergo "connection" meant the human-process of mapping a VoIP contact to a data-transfer app/credentials, opening second app, sending file, etc.
3. No, a second physical connection for the file stream doesn't necessarily mean "everything would work fine". Anything that requires a new protocol/extension would make classification of the product/feature/service game to be, well, gamed, by the ISP, for profit.
As the VoIP connection itself would need to at least be modified to signal/establish the physical data connection, you'd necessarily have a protocol variant - even if the file transfer itself was, say, ftp.
4. The whole point of the example is just "New product that extends old protocol, thereby giving ISP chance to QoS-round-file new product rather than compete". Focusing on the example itself is just wasting our time.
> "I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply."
I think Google is doing nothing more than hedging against the possibility that legislation will undercut the FCC's net neutrality kick; particularly given legislative power being likely to tip back to the strongly pro-corporate side.
I sincerely doubt they're negotiating with Verizon over treatment of any traffic that does not come from Google.
> You might want to consider asking people if there was a miscommunication before assuming they're unreasonable or ignorant.
Your entire argument is based on the assumption that Google is being unreasonable or ignorant. You're posing completely trivial scenarios of Verizon gaming the system, and assuming that Google is negotiating an agreement that is vulnerable to such trivial gaming.
Furthermore, your only evidence whatsoever about these non-public negotiations is an extremely vague and misleading NYT article, and a paragraph blurb from Eric Schmidt. You know next to nothing about these negotiations (as do I), but you're completely confident in asserting that it "completely falls apart upon examination."
> I sincerely doubt they're negotiating with Verizon over treatment of any traffic that does not come from Google.
Did you even read what Eric said? "What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another." If what they're negotiating only applied to Google, it would be the opposite of the principle Eric is describing.
> "Your entire argument is based on the assumption that Google is being unreasonable or ignorant."
Absolutely not. It's based solely on Verizon and Google operating in their own financial best interests. In fact, as far as my argument goes, Verizon and Google are placeholders for any ISP and any content company. The argument would be the same if we were talking about Verizon/NBC, Sprint/Microsoft or AT&T/Time Warner.
I'm not arguing against some hypothetical secret terms of a specific rumored agreement. I'm arguing against the line of logic I quoted in my original reply. Who it came from is irrelevant. It's a very common justification for QoS-by-type and it's a wholly misleading simplification.
I only referred to Google's interests because you brought it up. It's not in their best interests for them to argue for terms from Verizon that benefit more than Google itself, because that would necessarily weaken any concessions they could get for themselves. It would be unreasonable to expect Google to go toe-to-toe with Verizon behind closed doors and sign a binding agreement for the benefit of the entire internet.
Ignore hypotheticals, look at history. Say you have a network and you decide that voice calls are so important you should have (real) 5 nines reliability, backup generators, redundant capacity, the works. Now let's say that people start using this voice network to send data. Let's say that people start using other networks for voice traffic. Let's say that people start sending voice traffic as data. Let's say that people start using other forms entirely where they would have used voice (even for extremely important business and personal uses).
How do you decide what gets priority? How can you even know?
This is what has happened in real life. People started using modems on their land-lines. People got rid of their land-lines all together and used cell phones or voip as their sole voice line. People started communicating and doing business via email, text message, even facebook. Million dollar deals have been hashed out over blackberry messages. Relationships have been made and ended over IRC and SMS.
Meanwhile, the land-line voice network is orders of magnitude more expensive to operate even as it has become less relevant, because we thought we knew how to prioritize communications.
Even if your VoIP application offers a feature like streaming file transfer, you wouldn't actually implement that by sending that data over the VoIP connection, because the VoIP data requires real-time performance (the call starts breaking up if packets are delayed) but your streaming file transfer does not. It would be silly to let your multi-gigabyte file transfer DoS your VoIP call.
If you simply opened a second, non-VoIP connection for the file transfer, everything would work fine.
Would Verizon have an incentive to cheat by favoring its own services? Maybe, but that seems to be what these Google talks are all about in the first place. I think Google is aware that any agreement would need more teeth than trusting the goodness of Verizon's heart to comply.