On Net Neutrality

21 Jun 2007 · #techtalk

Google put up an official policy post on Net Neutrality a few days ago detailing what they think is okay and not okay to do by ISPs. From the post, they believe it is okay to engage in:

Prioritizing all applications of a certain general type, such as streaming video;

And further down, they say that it is not okay to engage in:

Prioritizing data packet delivery based on the ownership or affiliation (the who) of the content, or the source or destination (the what) of the content;

Hmm.. how exactly do you prioritize streaming video traffic? If you look at the packets coming from Youtube (flash video), Joost (some proprietary stuff I guess) and Vuze (bittorrent), they’ll all look different. And Vuze traffic would look similar to other bittorrent data traffic. How would you implement traffic shaping based on those packets to selectively prioritize video streaming content?

Of course, I imagine you could look at the source of the packets and match it against a list of known video content providers. But you can’t do that according to the above ‘not-okay’ policy! Catch-22? Someone please enlighten me.