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Some ISPs offer YouTube/Netflix/Facebook for free. How do they monitor that?
In Poland, it is common for mobile ISPs to offer plans with limited amount of bandwidth per month, with exclusion of some popular apps. So for example all traffic from youtube is not counted towards the data cap, but any other casual everyday browsing is.
Aside from net neutrality issues, I am wondering how is this achieved in the HTTPS age? How does the ISP know which packets to count towards the data cap?
It doesn't seem to be per-app, and no proxy is installed. My guess is that it's done by some kind of packet inspection. But what exactly are they looking at?
- forgotmypw 7y agoIt should be enough to look at the IP address.
- kuba-orlik 7y agoYeah, but all traffic from googlevideo.com is uncapped, but traffic from google.com is... how do they know which IPs to block? Youtube has like a ton of them and they probably change from time to time. If it's IP-based, how do they compile a list of IPs that are guaranteed to be youtube video content, but not anything else?
- emayljames 7y agoI'd imagine it will get more difficult for ISP's if encrypted DNS becomes standard. At this moment, they will have allowed IP ranges, that would cover for example; YouTube. Edit: Also, an ISP can always see what your endpoint is, as they would have to in order to give you the connection. The only exception to this being VPN's and TOR.
- forgotmypw 7y ago>Youtube has like a ton of them and they probably change from time to time. While that's true, it is not that many IPs, and they do not change that much. Maintaining a list of IPs for YouTube, Netflix, and other mainstream services is probably a couple hours of work per week at most, probably distributed between multiple people in whatever department handles it.