As one of the only U.S. privacy laws with a private right of action, you can bet an online data use violation of this law will be challenged at some point soon. (Eg; The potential for de-identification of the Netflix ‘prize’ data or Brightroll providing behavioral targeting to streaming video users.)

to keep the metaphor if you want your package to be delivered faster you pay for premium service (be it with FedEx or UPS or the Canada Post ..). that’s what people paying for High speed are doing I guess. if I want to just read my emails a 56kpbs connection is more that enough, and costs a lot less.

It is true most certainly that P2P traffic can certainly be cumbersom (Bittorrent for instance fills up conection queues very quickly– depending) but there are other methods to do so. QOS and Priority Queus are one of these (personallyI use that to balance the traffic in my network). should I need an SSH connection I can without halting any P2P traffic as I gave SSh high priority and if I don;t … well P2P traffic can flow as quick as it can. and everybody is happy.
Which is not the case with ISPs. Actualy only one taht is afecting others using his position as leader in that market. If some ISP decided to put that for his client I don;t see why other ISP`s client should suffer from that.

But, as Matthias points out, traffic management equipment, such as that produced by Sandvine, also analyzes the pattern of packets. Turns out a lot of traffic can be identified merely by watching the pattern of packets. Recent research has even shown that shell commands going over SSH can be identified – all without breaking the underlying encryption. So, even universal encryption would not stop all traffic throttling or even network-level user profiling.

Dan – The OSI model has no clear mapping to the modern Internet. How do you define DPI in terms of current networking technology?

Michael – note that DPI is not something that can easily be an “opt-in” technology. When you’re trying to identify a spreading worm or a spam flood from a botnet, the contributions from individual hosts can be relatively modest; they are only problematic in aggregate.

While I don’t condone what Bell has been doing to the smaller ISPs, I can see why they might be doing it: if traffic from all sources is getting pushed onto Bell’s backbone without any labeling, then they would be left with either shaping the traffic of everyone or nobody. But really, if this is the case then this is an example of incompetence: they implemented a bad network architecture and now they are stuck with it. This is probably all the more reason, though, that we need good regulations and regulators.

That was the point of my essay – DPI is a set of networking technologies that have both legitimate and illegitimate uses. The bad part is not looking in payloads; the bad part is looking at payloads for the wrong reason (advertising vs. legit traffic management) or in the wrong way (exposing private communications to humans, rather than algorithms).

Internet traffic must be managed because there are always circumstances where there are insufficient resources – in crisis situations, sometimes much, much less. To manage traffic you have to understand it in some way. For multiple reasons the information necessary for understanding modern Internet traffic is more than that supplied by standard packet headers.

I’m actually a bit worried about universal encryption of network traffic because it would make traffic management a lot more difficult. I care about privacy a lot. (I digitally sign my email with GNU Privacy Guard and encrypt with everyone I can – do you?) But I care about the Internet working as well.

But that’s the topic for another essay.

–Anil