There is a battle brewing and at stake is the control or lack of it that you or your business will have over your internet connection and experience. Many have discussed the issue of Net Neutrality but for many Canadian users, individuals and businesses, it is still a concept that has proven difficult to grasp.
Rogers Cable and Bell have both begun getting their hands dirty with your data and now some of the consequences of not adhering to a policy of Net Neutrality are beginning to become more evident to paying customers of Rogers Cable and Bell's high-speed internet offerings. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be focusing some of my posts on the various issues and angles surrounding the Net Neutrality debate and how it can impact you personally and-or your business.
What is Deep Packet Inspection?
Imagine a typical highway that was divided up into two lanes, a fast lane and slow lane. Now imagine that at every on-ramp to the highway was an inspection booth that each driver had to pass through before getting on the highway. At this booth, an officer would inspect your car and its contents and then make a decision as to which lane you were permitted to travel on. On a very basic level, that is what Deep Packet Inspection is all about. Rogers Cable and Bell have now begun inspecting your data that you upload or download from the web, and are then subsequently forcing you into one of those two lanes depending on the contents of your data. What gets your data into the slow lane? If it's data intensive files like music or video, that is something the DPI (virtual) officers will flag you for and toss you into the slow lane. Today, that is the criteria, but tomorrow or next year you might end up in the slow lane for things like ie- viewing a competitor's web offering. Hence the parallel to wiretapping your phone - ISPs are listening in on your data, and making judgements based on what they discover.
Why use Deep Packet Inspection?
The Internet Service Providers (ISP) will tell you that deep packet inspection is necessary in order to ensure that there is enough bandwidth available (especially during peak hours) to ensure that all types of traffic are getting through. With the rise of online video and peer-to-peer file sharing, the ISPs claim that these data-intensive tasks are putting basic services like email traffic at risk of not getting through. In order to ensure that all traffic continues to move, Rogers Cable and Bell have begun using deep packet inspection to relegate certain types of uploading and downloading to the slow lane on the highway.
How far can Deep Packet Inspection go?
I don't want to sound overly alarmist or get too Orwellian on you but the stakes are high and your privacy could some day be caught in the Deep Packet Inspection cross-hairs.
...but some of these devices (Deep Packet Inspection devices) can go much further; those from a company like Narus (Deep Packet Inspection hardware provider), for instance, can look inside all traffic from a specific IP address, pick out the HTTP traffic, then drill even further down to capture only traffic headed to and from Gmail, and can even reassemble e-mails as they are typed out by the user.In my next post focusing on Net Neutrality, I will provide some real-world examples of how deep packet inspection is being used by ISPs like Rogers Cable and Bell.
In the meantime, if you would like to learn more about Net Neutrality check out the Wikipedia page and consider signing the Canadian petition for Net Neutrality over at Neutrality.ca.
quote source ars technica
TAGS: Bell, Deep Packet Inspection, Dpi, Internet, Net Neutrality, Rogers Cable
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Personally, I don't think it's "alarmist" at all to point out the blatant violations of our very Constitutions (Canadian and US, at least), and the obvious implications of allowing this to continue.
The last time I checked, it was NOT LEGAL for a provider to "open and inspect data packets", which is what DPI does. You'd think it would have been enough that providers are not liable for the content transmitted... provided they DON'T OPEN IT and become "aware" of it.
There's too much wealth of information in there that shouldn't be trusted to a provider (or anyone, really), particularly the ones that have been recently approached by the MAFIAA and their "moral, ethical and legal responsibility" to be police in the fight against piracy. Bell and Rogers were two such providers.
I hate this current trend where EVERYBODY shares your personal info with EVERYBODY ELSE, without that CONSENT that is supposed to be there, and still thinking they're not doing anything wrong. Now we have providers sniffing through our packets, and collecting data. Who's to say that, alone, shouldn't raise a trust issue?
Bell has not only been playing with the concept of cooperating with the entertainment industry (as openly revealed in recent changes to the TOS)- they want to BE THE LAW for the Canadian Internet. And besides attempting to circumvent the establishment of "net neutrality", Bell is also trying to rewrite the Canadian Constitution, Fair Practice Laws, and existing CRTC tariffs to suit itself.
Anyway, the Bell network, specifically, was built with PUBLIC MONEY. Bell can't claim ultimate "ownership", as it seems to be doing.
Eventually, everything we have going for us gets torn apart in the name of advertising, profiteering, and power. The Internet, I'm afraid, will probably suffer the same fate. It's simply too full of possibilities... the Corporate Machine, by nature, simply must OWN it.