Mundie imagines three tiers of Internet ID: one for people, one for machines and one for programs (which often act as proxies for the other two).
Answering this question begins with an explanation of the various tiers of internet access.
Cox, like many of its competitors, currently offers three tiers of Internet access, each with faster connections for a slightly higher price.
But what I've been clear about, what the White House has been clear about is, is that we expect whatever final rules to emerge to make sure that we're not creating two or three or four tiers of Internet.
NetZero, the largest of the free-service providers, says its registered user base has reached 3 million -- which would rank it in the top tier of commercial Internet access providers, like Earthlink and Microsoft's MSN, although well back of America Online and its 20 million paying subscribers.
This helped put EarthLink's subscriber base into the top tier of consumer Internet service providers.
It's a tacit tiering of the internet: real-name-verified authored content and everything else.
But tiering the speed of internet services to end users - which is already common practice from many landline ISPs - is not necessarily the same issue which riles the campaigners.
As Eldon Thomas, who recently left the Boston Consulting Group to go to a dot com, puts it: "Consulting is now a safe, secure second-tier occupation compared to the glamorous, gotta-have type of Internet position".
In this paper, we present tiered-service fair queuing (TSFQ), a new scheduler that exploits certain properties of Internet traffic to speed up the bottleneck operations related to virtual time computation and packet sorting.
