DPI and Net Neutrality's Overseas Weak Spot

Ian Lamont writes "An unnamed source at an American ISP says staff there briefly considered using Deep Packet Inspection to comply with an order from Argentina's Department of Justice to block access to a local gambling site. The ISP ended up not going that route, owing to the cost, but some engineers at the company worry that DPI will eventually be implemented on the ISP's overseas network, thereby positioning it for an easier US rollout should Net Neutrality lose out in Washington. Besides being used for traffic-shaping, DPI can also monitor the traffic of ISP subscribers to supply targeted advertising."

Comments

This is where customers put their foot down.

[MindlessAutomata]

And say "No".

Even if it hurts in the short run. The loss of consumer bargaining power in these instances, where the contracts possibly allow for this, is the fault of the general consumer to begin with.

Re:This is where customers put their foot down.

[snl2587]

And say "No".

I ask, "to whom?". The ISPs are not the only ones who want (to use a generalization) the traffic of subscribers to be monitored. I think you overestimate the power of the consumers in this case.

Re:This is where customers put their foot down.

[garett_spencley]

I'll encrypt what I need to be private. And let them block all they want within the SLA, I'll pay for the level of service I need.

What happens when ISPs start to throttle (or block all together) encrypted or binary data ?

I can already imagine the justifications: "binary data consists largely of pirated software and media!", "only terrorists, pedophiles and other criminals have something to hide and use encryption!" "yap yap yap!"

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I believe that the Internet is one of the greatest assets for human advancement and achievement since the printing press. It is far too important to us to allow certain groups with special interests to ruin it for everyone. One last resort is to force ISPs who succumb to government pressure out of business. In the meantime we have to use every single democratic and diplomatic means at our disposal to force government to make the decisions that serve the larger population's wishes, and not the small special interest groups that want to shut the rest of the world up.

Re:This is where customers put their foot down.

[philspear]

You convinced me. I'd like to get in on this boycott. Send me an e-mail when I need to cancel my internet, and then send me another email when the boycott is over and I can resume using the... internet...

I think I may see a problem here.

DIP will likely be rolled out to support QoS.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

IMHO Deep Packet Inspection will be rolled out to identify the protocols in use on connections, to support assigning the correct QoS to different protocols.

For instance: File transfers accelerate until they consume (and equally divide) all bandwidth at the most congested link in their path, but just slow down if they're artificially limited below that level. Meanwhile Streams are band limited but must go to the front of the line to meet their jitter and delivery reliability requirements, though delayed stream packets are useless and should be dropped to avoid also delaying their successors.

Unfortunately the tagging of the packet itself can't be trusted because there is an incentive to achieve improved service by cheating, requesting better service than necessary. (And a Microsoft IP stack, widely deployed, made just this "improvement".)

My take: The right solution is to write a contract for various rates of "premium" packets, then accept the labeling but demote the QoS on packets above the running limit. Then the incentive is on the user to obtain software that doesn't cheat, and the ISP doesn't need to deep inspect.

Unfortunately, the ISPs and equipment vendors seem to be going with the DPI identification approach. And that means deploying DPI, which can then be misused by the ISPs to do the bad kind of non-neutrality.

Re:ISPs in Canada already throttle encrypted traff

[Anonymous Coward]

They throttle https? How have online banks and retailers reacted?

Re:All the more reason to move to IPv6...

[kriss]

I'd hand out a complimentary tinfoil hat if I had one.

IPv6 is on the radar and requested as a must-have, but normally only on a roadmap level ("Will your product support this some time in the future?"). In some parts of the world (there's more to it than the US), any device incapable of IPv6 won't get onto the network in the first place.

If you stop to think about the practical implications for a while, it's very unlikely that encryption will be that much more widespread than it is today (it's a processing power issue as well, not just one of protocol ease of implementation) while the whole NAT issue will be zapped. This means that DPI gear all of a sudden can pick out a whole lot more, since traffic that'd normally be aggregated by a NAT - won't be. Insta-higher-resolution.

There's no conspiracy here. Really.