ISPs slowing P2P traffic...

Deepak Jain deepak at ai.net
Wed Jan 9 21:04:42 UTC 2008



>> They're not the only ones getting ready.  There are at least 5 anonymous
>> P2P file sharing networks that use RSA or Diffie-Hellman key exchange
>> to seed AES/Rijndael encryption at up to 256 bits. See:
> 
>> http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
> 
>> You can only filter that which you can see, and there are many ways
>> to make it hard to see what's going over the wire.
> 
> Bottom line - "they" can probably deploy the countermeasures faster than
> "we" can deploy the shaping....

I'm certain of this. First adopters are always ahead of the curve. The 
question is when a "quality of service" (little Q) -- the purported 
"improving the surfing experience for the rest of our users" is the 
stated reason....

They (whatever provider is taking a position) should transparently state 
their policies and enforcement mechanisms. They shouldn't be selectively 
prioritizing traffic based on their perception of its purpose. The 
standard of reasonableness would be where the net functions better... 
such as dropping ICMPs or attack traffic in favor of traffic with a 
higher signal-to-noise ratio (e.g. TCP).

As opposed to whose traffic can we drop that is the least likely to 
result in a complaint or cancellation... The reason I consider this 
invalid, is because its a kissing-cousin to "whose traffic can we 
penalize that we can later charge access to as a /premium service/"?

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but basically if everyone got 
the 10mb/s service they believe they got when they ordered their 
connection, there would be no place to pay for "higher priority" service 
to Youtube or what-have-you -- except when you want more than 10mb/s 
service.

I think the important trial of DirectTVs VoD service over the Internet 
is going to be an awesome test case of this in real life. It may save 
them from me cancelling my DirectTV subscription just to see how Verizon 
FIOS handle the video streams. :)

DJ



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