ISP port blocking practice
Justin Shore
justin at justinshore.com
Fri Oct 23 22:43:32 UTC 2009
Dan White wrote:
> On 23/10/09 17:58 -0400, James R. Cutler wrote:
>> Blocking the well known port 25 does not block sending of mail. Or the
>> message content.
>
> It does block incoming SMTP traffic on that well known port.
Then the customer should have bought a class of service that permits
servers.
>> I think the relevant neutrality principle is that traffic is not blocked
>> by content.
>
> My personal definition doesn't quite gel with that. You're deciding for the
> customer how they can use their connection, before you have any evidence of
> nefarious activity.
They decided for themselves when they bought a residential connection
instead of a business circuit. Just because someone bought themselves a
Camry doesn't mean that Toyota is deciding for them that they can't haul
1000lbs of concrete with it. The customer did when they decided to buy
a car and not a pickup.
> Would you consider restricting a customer's outgoing port 25 traffic to a
> specific mail server a step over the net neutrality line?
I do this all the time. For example I don't let my customers send or
receive mail (or any traffic for that matter) from prefixes originating
from AS32311 (Colorado spammer Scott Richter). Now if I was blocking
mail to dnc.org, gop.com, greenpeace.org, etc or restricting Vonage to
.05% of my bandwidth then yeah that would violate net neutrality
principles. The difference is one stifles speech and is
anti-competitive. The other mitigates a network security and stability
risk.
I see this same argument on Slashdot all too often. It's usually
bundled with an argument against providers doing any sort of traffic
aggregation ("if I buy 1.5Mbps then it should be a dedicated pipe
straight to the Internet!") Unfortunately that's simply not reality.
You can either live with a small level of controls on your traffic for
the sake of stability and security or you can have wide-open ISPs with
no security prohibitions whatsoever. The support costs for the ISPs go
through the roof and of course that gets passed onto the customer. Your
5 9s SLA gets replaced with "use it while you can before it goes down
again". Everyone pays a penalty for having a digital Wild West. Not to
start another thread on a completely OT topic but the same concept can
be applied to other things like health care. Either everyone can pay a
little bit for all to have good service or many average consumers can
pay lots to make up the losses for those that can't pay at all.
Justin
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