Although in previous years we investigated telecommunications regulation issues in both the federal and state arenas, we have focused instead this year on research that might diminish the need for regulatory attention to the Internet industry. For example, we have proposed an IP traffic precedence policy that can enable a graceful transition into a more competitively supplied Internet market that might obviate the need for federal interest in regulation. Claffy and Braun outline this proposal with UCSD Professor Roger Bohn and Stephen Wolff of NSF, in ``Mitigating the coming Internet crunch: multiple service levels via Precedence''. The paper appeared in a 1994 special issue of the Journal of High Speed Networks and is also available in postscript and html from www.sdsc.edu.
The paper discusses how taking advantage of existing IP functionality to use multiple levels of service precedence can begin to address disparities between the requirements of conventional and more new and highly demanding applications.
We have had discussions with NSF and NASA representatives regarding accounting/pricing experiments on NASA Sciences Internet (NSI) and concerns of accounting for federal IP networks. We hosted a meeting in San Diego in August with Joe Bailey, of MIT and David Brown from NASA, UCSD professor Roger Bohn, Hans-Werner Braun, and K Claffy. We have also actively read and contributed to discussion on the com-priv mailing list with respect to accounting and pricing methodologies.
Our approach has assumed the belief that at least so far, the less regulation of the Internet, and in fact the more progress in removing regulatory barriers for existing telecommunications companies so they can participate more effectively in the Internet market, the better. However we recognize that regulatory issues may become quite prominent as the Internet and telecommunications industry increasingly overlap in functionality and market targets, and we will keep a close eye on the likely two-way interaction between regulatory trends and Internet marketization.