6th
Peer to Peer Throttling Continues, But the Real Threat Lies Unmentioned
Bell Canada has been caught throttling peer-to-peer traffic. The reality is that this stuff has been deployed in most networks around the world in either test or production capacity. The debate is all about throttling which may miss the point. Throttling is a necessary component of a working network. Your PC throttles its bandwidth usage by virtue of using TCP. The routers and switches along the network, when they have more packets than they can process, drop packets all the time. It’s not physically possible to build a network that doesn’t throttle traffic in some way unless you can control all of the endpoints and control the rate at which they send data. Throttling is just a necessary and fundamental part of the network and it always has been.
What’s more scary is the inspection piece. What’s so scary about throttling peer-to-peer traffic is that the networks _know_ that it’s peer-to-peer traffic. Most p2p protocols masquerade as other protocols by using ports commonly used by other applications (HTTP or SMTP). In order to recognize p2p traffic, the network actually needs to look past the IP header into the body of the packet. This allows the network to distinguish between web browser traffic and p2p traffic, both using port 80.
Today they’re just using this inspection technology to determine which protocol you’re using. But it’s not a huge leap to extract specific and meaningful data out of those packets. Companies like adzilla and NebuAd are already using the same technology to deliver targeted advertising to users. It won’t be long before the ISP’s can remember all of the websites you visit, all of the posts to your blog, all of the songs you’ve downloaded. And what’s really scary is that there aren’t really many ways you can get around it.
ISP’s can learn this information merely because you connect to the inetnet through them. Encrypted traffic is obviously out of bounds, but today it is impracticle to encrypt every single packet from every single application you use. The opportunities for abuse are far spread…
