...more recent posts
I'm trying to get worked up about this network neutrality stuff. I firmly believe the big telcos will try to screw the small guy if they can. Discriminating against VOIP clients - by introducing jitter, or whatever - seems to be the common example since obviously the telcos don't want you making free VOIP phone calls over their lines. But in that case we'll just encrypt our VOIP streams and run them on non standard ports. This is exactly what BitTorrent users are now doing to fight ISPs starting to throttle BT traffic. And given the robustness of client CPU power, encrypting all our communication streams would be very easy. It would also have all sorts of follow on advantages for the user in terms of security.
But maybe I'm wrong on this? Can the telcos somehow still discriminate against types of services if all traffic is encrypted? Probably I'm missing something, but this just sounds like another arms race that the forces of control will never win. I'd like to have some law protecting us, but I'm skeptical that we really need it.
Unless they outlaw encryption? Seems pretty unlikely. Or what am I missing?