[ NNSquad ] Re: "Deep Packet Inspection" Trade Group

[Edward Almasy <ealmasy@scout.wisc.edu>]

On Feb 12, 2008, at 8:41 PM, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
> This page, in particular:
>   https://www.dpacket.org/articles/benefits-and-risks-mandating-network-neutrality-and-quest-balanced-policy
> would seem to be of interest in terms of the subject matter here.

Section 3 in this paper, titled "The Benefits of Discrimination",  
strikes me as a prototypical example of scope creep in this debate.   
According to Peha, instead of just providing a connection to the  
Internet, apparently implicit in the ISP's role is virus and spyware  
detection and blocking, adult content filtering, and preventing the  
use of unauthorized network devices by children.

While ISPs can certainly make any or all of those services available  
to customers as part of their business model, justifying DPI of  
everyone's network traffic by citing those services as (mandatory?)  
benefits is disingenuous, and quickly leads (again, as the paper  
demonstrates) to muddling the issues by lumping together activities  
that don't require content-level inspection (e.g. blocking DoS  
attacks) with those that do (e.g. blocking spyware).  Of course, that  
muddling makes it much easier to spin DPI as something that's really  
for the benefit of the end user, which I guess may in part explain the  
paper appearing in this context.

(To be fair, he does provide an interesting and more lengthy  
discussion in section 4 on some of the complications that may arise  
without network neutrality, though the seemingly much greater weight  
of those complications make his subsequent call for a balanced policy  
ring a little hollow.)

Ed