ISPs slowing P2P traffic...

Deepak Jain deepak at ai.net
Wed Jan 9 20:04:37 UTC 2008




http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/TenFold-Jump-In-Encrypted-BitTorrent-Traffic-89260
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Traffic-Shaping-Impacts-Gnutella-Lotus-Notes-88673
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Net-Neutrality-iOverblowni-73225

If I am mistakenly being duped by some crazy fascists, please let me know.

However, my question is simply.. for ISPs promising broadband service. 
Isn't it simpler to just announce a bandwidth quota/cap that your "good" 
users won't hit and your bad ones will? This chasing of the lump 
under-the-rug (slowing encrypted traffic, then VPN traffic and so on...) 
seems like the exact opposite of progress to me (by progressively 
nastier filters, impeding the traffic your network was built to move, etc).

Especially when there is no real reason this P2P traffic can't 
masquerade as something really interesting... like Email or Web (https, 
hello!) or SSH or gamer traffic. I personally expect a day when there is 
a torrent "encryption" module that converts everything to look like a 
plain-text email conversation or IRC or whatever.

When you start slowing encrypted or VPN traffic, you start setting 
yourself up to interfere with all of the bread&butter applications 
(business, telecommuters, what have you).

I remember Bill Norton's peering forum regarding P2P traffic and how the 
majority of it is between cable and other broadband providers... 
Operationally, why not just lash a few additional 10GE cross-connects 
and let these *paying customers* communicate as they will?

All of these "traffic shaping" and "traffic prioritization" techniques 
seem a bit like the providers that pushed for ubiquitous broadband 
because they liked the margins don't want to deal with a world where 
those users have figured out ways to use these amazing networks to do 
things... whatever they are. If they want to develop incremental 
revenue, they should do it by making clear what their caps/usage 
profiles are and moving ahead... or at least transparently share what 
shaping they are doing and when.

I don't see how Operators could possibly debug connection/throughput 
problems when increasingly draconian methods are used to manage traffic 
flows with seemingly random behaviors. This seems a lot like the 
evil-transparent caching we were concerned about years ago.

So, to keep this from turning into a holy war, or a non-operational 
policy debate, and assuming you agree that providers of consumer 
connectivity shouldn't employee transparent traffic shaping because it 
screws the savvy customers and business customers. ;)

What can be done operationally?

For legitimate applications:

Encouraging "encryption" of more protocols is an interesting way to 
discourage this kind of shaping.

Using IPv6 based IPs instead of ports would also help by obfuscating 
protocol and behavior. Even IP rotation through /64s (cough 1 IP per 
half-connection anyone).

For illegitimate applications:

Port knocking and pre-determined stream hopping (send 50Kbytes on this 
port/ip pairing then jump to the next, etc, etc)

My caffeine hasn't hit, so I can't think of anything else. Is this 
something the market will address by itself?

DJ



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