[MLB-WIRELESS] The future

[Andrew Harcourt]

> I think mark was implying that a person with an important
> routing node would suddently start charging for the relay
> of packets ot other parts of the free network.

Then they'd better have a carrier's licence :)

> I think the whole "providing inet access to wireless ppl"
> thing has been debated quite a bit already and as someone
> else mentioned "unnamed telcos ARE watching these mailling
> lists".

No surprises there...

I think the short answer here is that if someone wants to charge for traffic
through their node, they have to a) be legally entitled to do so (meaning
that they have to purchase a licence) and b) they have to live with the
response that they receive from other members of the WAN community.

I think we can leave the legal issues of whether or not we're allowed to
*pay* for someone to carry our traffic and still operate without a licence
ourselves (eg. if A hits E via B, C, D and C starts charging, are B and D
permitted to carry traffic between A and a commercial provider?) We can at
least leave this until someone is silly enough to try doing it - and then we
can sit back and watch them get mulched by the various telco watchdogs that
are listening.

All in all, however, the logical solution is to simply not use their node
for forwarding any more. Routers can be programmed to do so - so it's a
pretty simple solution for our kind of potential problem.

Methinks we need to worry less about hypothetical legal and regulatory
issues, and more about how to actually get this thing up and running. If
anyone breaks it for us, we can deal with it then :)

Just my $0.02.

Regards,
Andrew


--------------------------------------
Andrew Harcourt
Telstra Research Laboratories

+61392536210 (office)
+61409723311 (mobile)
andrew (at) harcourt at team.telstra.com
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