They're not the only ones getting ready. There are at least 5 anonymous
P2P file sharing networks that use RSA or Diffie-Hellman key exchange
to seed AES/Rijndael encryption at up to 256 bits. See:
http://www.planetpeer.de/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
You can only filter that which you can see, and there are many ways
to make it hard to see what's going over the wire.
Bottom line - "they" can probably deploy the countermeasures faster than
"we" can deploy the shaping....
I'm certain of this. First adopters are always ahead of the curve. The
question is when a "quality of service" (little Q) -- the purported
"improving the surfing experience for the rest of our users" is the
stated reason....
They (whatever provider is taking a position) should transparently state
their policies and enforcement mechanisms. They shouldn't be selectively
prioritizing traffic based on their perception of its purpose. The
standard of reasonableness would be where the net functions better...
such as dropping ICMPs or attack traffic in favor of traffic with a
higher signal-to-noise ratio (e.g. TCP).
As opposed to whose traffic can we drop that is the least likely to
result in a complaint or cancellation... The reason I consider this
invalid, is because its a kissing-cousin to "whose traffic can we
penalize that we can later charge access to as a /premium service/"?
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but basically if everyone got
the 10mb/s service they believe they got when they ordered their
connection, there would be no place to pay for "higher priority" service
to Youtube or what-have-you -- except when you want more than 10mb/s
service.
I think the important trial of DirectTVs VoD service over the Internet
is going to be an awesome test case of this in real life. It may save
them from me cancelling my DirectTV subscription just to see how Verizon
FIOS handle the video streams. :)
DJ