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Europe's 'Net Neutrality' Could Allow Throttling of Torrents and VPNs (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: TorrentFreak reports that the European Parliament is approaching a vote on new telecom regulations that aim to implement net neutrality throughout EU member states. Unfortunately, the legislation hinges on a few key amendments, and experts are warning about the consequences should those amendments fail to pass. "These amendments will ensure that specific types of traffic aren't throttled around the clock, for example. The current language would allow ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic permanently if that would optimize overall 'transmission quality.' This is not a far-fetched argument, since torrent traffic can be quite demanding on a network." That's not the only concern: "Besides file-sharing traffic the proposed legislation also allows Internet providers to interfere with encrypted traffic, including VPN connections. Since encrypted traffic can't be classified though deep packet inspection, ISPs may choose to de-prioritize it altogether."
If some ISP starts "de-priotizing" all ecnrypted traffic, they'll soon have 95% de-priotized, which will make it useless anyway.
It depends on your definition of 'net neutrality'.
1 - Every packet is of equal weight and value, irrespective of content
2 - Every packet is of equal weight and value, irrespective of source or destination
3 - both of the above
Where bandwidth demand is greater than availability - i.e. 6pm on a Sunday on residential networks - something has to give.
I'm very comfortable with my ISP choosing not to take option 1 if it means that packets for online gamers get low latency, video streams don't buffer and web browsing remains interactive. If that means someone's Linux distribution takes another two minutes to download, then that's a reasonable use of the available resources.
Where I dig my heels in on net neutrality is option 2. If the ISP prioritises its own video streaming service ahead of others, its own gaming service ahead of others, its favourite partners' websites ahead of others, then it's prejudicing the market and acting in bad faith.
So no, do traffic shaping by all means. It's a reasonable and proportionate approach to assuring quality of service. Just do it for all packets of that type.