The system may evolve over time in several directions, depending on the reception within the community. It will certainly affect the role of application software developers, who will modify programs to provide the end user with partial although not necessarily total control over precedence, as well as for network service providers that would be able to offer a variety of levels of service qualities.
Application developers may enhance their software to optimize use of fixed quotas, while staying within the general scope of priority assignment guidelines. Some of these changes will be helpful to total system performance, while others will be neutral or detrimental. For example, time shifting of bulk transmissions to times of less congestion helps everyone, but is non-trivial when considering time zones across the entire globe. Monitoring transmission delays and setting precedence dynamically to procure high bandwidth is neutral. Violations by small numbers of highly skilled users does not vitiate the overall value of the proposal; if the violations become egregious, they will require detection and tracing.
The precedence-setting scheme may become arbitrarily sophisticated. One useful enhancement would be to dynamically adapt the IP precedence level to actual user requirements. For example, the user would raise the precedence level for interactive or urgent e-mail traffic requiring immediate response. The user would lower the precedence level for file transfers or other deferable services.
The quota formulas could be sensitive to the time of day, destination, or other factors. One could envision a secondary market in precedence points, as customers engage in side trades among themselves. Monetary value attached to precedence points would provide another signal to service providers to upgrade their networks.
In any case, the strategy we propose will provide an incentive directly to the end user to be sensitive to network resource consumptions and to make more efficient use of available bandwidth, whether with compression techniques, user-friendly delayed-transmission methods (e.g. ``ftp this file within four hours''), or other mechanisms. Downstream customers could implement such mechanisms gradually, as their upstream providers find the need to provide an incentive to do so.