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Creating a law that says "application agnostic" is going to leave things up to considerable legal debate. Define "application": "Web traffic": Services that r

Creating a law that says "application agnostic" is going to leave things up to considerable legal debate. Define "application": "Web traffic": Services that run over TCP/80 or TCP/443 "Video streaming": Delivery of live or buffered video "VoIP": Phone calls over IP With categories like the above: (1) How would you filter in an agnostic way? I can stream video inside of a TCP/443 tunnel, I can send VoIP there too... how do you know what it is? Match off of source IP? I can get crafty and distribute my content through a CDN -- do you block the CDN? Do you require them to register each application with you? (2) What would prevent a provider from coming up with a way to bypass their own filters in a way that follows the "letter of the law" but not the intent? If a "hostile" application was circumventing things by tunneling or hiding their traffic the "quality team" would catch them and block it. If a friendly application did the same the "quality team" can just claim "they don't have the ability or measures in place to detect application B". It sounds good in theory but in practice any ability to classify traffic will create a non-agnostic system once the business people spending the capital call their legal teams for advise.

RBr 16y ago
For me, one of your points seems to be on the money: "Do you require them to register each application with you?" For quite a while, Governments have wanted to accurately classify and throttle traffic / consumption for certain services. For example, in Canada, we're not allowed to watch U.S. streaming video feeds other than U.S. video advertising. There are of course stronger international examples, but in the U.S. it may seem attractive to build a registration system on top of anything built for the web so that it could be shaped, monitored and shut down.

RBr 16y ago

For me, one of your points seems to be on the money: "Do you require them to register each application with you?" For quite a while, Governments have wanted to accurately classify and throttle traffic / consumption for certain services. For example, in Canada, we're not allowed to watch U.S. streaming video feeds other than U.S. video advertising. There are of course stronger international examples, but in the U.S. it may seem attractive to build a registration system on top of anything built for the web so that it could be shaped, monitored and shut down.