Net Neutrality, Round Three
So lately the ISPs, most recently Rogers in Canada, have been shooting themselves in the foot by proving they cannot be trusted to act as a dumb pipe and deliver the content that internet users request. Rogers was recently caught inserting their own content into webpages, with the excuse that they needed to let their users know they were nearing bandwidth overage. Problem is they insert their own ad onto someone else’s content to do it. Ars Technica has an example here of Rogers hijacking Google’s homepage.
A month or so ago Comcast and other ISPs were caught inserting code into the bittorrent streams to signal a disconnection, so Comcast could “manage” its network.
Then we get into the issues with people trying to route around these problems by encrypting all their traffic, and ISPs like Rogers reshaping those datastreams, in some cases cutting ISP customers off from their employers’ VPNs.
Rogers and Comcast aren’t the only two ISPs pulling this shit. There are others. How do you know if your ISP is playing fairly? Some folks up in the Unis in Washington State and Vancouver built an online tool for you to test and see if the html you receive is the same as what’s being served by the server. Even better, the data that ensues from your test will be amalgamated to show the US and Canadian governments exactly what’s going on. And the folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have developed software tools to help bittorrent users determine if they’ve been packet shaped. The EFF will use the data to fight the good fight for Net Neutrality.
Since the FCC has such a huge amount of trouble gathering accurate data, let’s give them a hand, k? And pass it on to Congress while we’re at it?
Technorati Tags: Net Neutrality, packet shaping, network management, dumb pipe, common carriage
