Is Your Network Neutral?

摘要

Network neutrality ought to be a simple issue on the public Internet. But every organization that runs a network is about to face similar questions to those vexing Congress and the FTC: Should networks act like the proverbial series of tubes that simply transport data between endpoints? Or should they open up the packets they carry, treating each differently according to its sender or the contents? The answers aren't so clear cut when applied to enterprise networks. The Internet was designed to be neutral, treating all traffic equally. As enterprise networks shifted to IP, they followed the same principle. Though employees at work can't necessarily expect the same fat pipes to peer-to-peer apps and porn as paying customers at home, little intelligence resides in the network itself. Enterprise IT is about applications, and these run on servers or clients.