NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Richard Bennett on Comcast and Fairness (from IP)
> > [ Exactly how will you and the RIAA/MPAA accomplish this when most or all > P2P traffic becomes entirely encrypted, and perhaps embedded in continuous > encrypted proxy streams to make traffic analysis and picking out P2P > extremely difficult? Unlike in so many situations in this world, when it > comes to Internet technology ordinary users do have the means to fight > back against what they view as inappropriate ISP activities. ISPs can of > course go the other route you suggest and raise prices or end "unlimited" > service packages at affordable rates, but there will be competitive > implications to doing this as well. > > -- Lauren Weinstein > NNSquad Moderator ] Lauren, I find your faith in this technological terror, err, cryptography disturbing. EG, the strength of piracy on the Internet is the ease of getting the pirated material, and the ease of distribution. Thus rather than playing Whak-A-Mole on Torrent servers (which are largely offshore), with ISP cooperation it becomes possible to play Whak-A-Mole on the users... So the MP/RI-AA surfs the Torrent sites, and connects to the torrents with a manipulated client, verifies that a particular torrent is a copyright violation, maps the users of the torrent, and then sends an automated list of the nodes to the ISP saying "This graph is bad, any edge between two nodes in this graph should be killed", and you simply RST-flood any edge in the graph which crosses your network. If this means dropping your bandwidth bill by 30-50% by kicking deliberately-noncacheable bittorrent traffic of your network, while making it easier to negotiate a deal for your video on demand service at the same time, and reduceing the likelyhood that Hollyweird will get even MORE draconian legislation pushed through, you do it. This won't stop closed-world pirates, but those are far less annoying to the ISPs simply because there are so many fewer of them, and less important to the MP/RI-AA because they are less likely to be users you can convert to paying customers if you make the illegal content sources unusable.