Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

Fri Oct 26 18:33:56 UTC 2007

On Fri, 26 Oct 2007, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>> If Comcast had used Sandvine's other capabilities to inspect and drop 
>> particular packets, would that have been more acceptable?
>
> Yes, definately.

So another in-line device is better than an out-of-band device.

> ... but terminating the connection is not. Spoofing packets is not something 
> an ISP should do. Ever. Dropping and/or delaying packets, yes, spoofing, no.

So ISPs should not do any NAT, transparent accelerators, transparent web 
caches, walled gardens for infected computers, etc.

We seem to agree that ISPs can "intefere" with network traffic, the debate 
is only how they do it.