Fergie's Tech Blog

Nuts and Bolts of Network Discrimination: Encryption

Ed Felten writes on Freedom to Tinker:

Scenarios for network discrimination typically involve an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who looks at users’ traffic and imposes delays or other performance penalties on certain types of traffic. To do this, the ISP must be able to tell the targeted data packets apart from ordinary packets. For example, if the ISP wants to penalize VoIP (Internet telephony) traffic, it must be able to distinguish VoIP packets from ordinary packets.

One way for users to fight back is to encrypt their packets, on the theory that encrypted packets will all look like gibberish to the ISP, so the ISP won’t be able to tell one type of packet from another.

posted by Fergie @ 3/21/2006 08:45:00 AM