document updated 19 years ago, on Jun 10, 2007

Network neutrality — the princicple that ISP's shouldn't throttle packets by WHO the customer connects to (but may in some cases still allow for QoS/packet-shaping, as long as it does't cross certain ethical barriers)
- ISP's have begun to apply packet shaping to specific services: Roger's Cable (largest ISP in canada) in 2005, Time Warner in June 2007
- One response P2P apps can make to selective throttling is to encrypt their traffic and use random ports, so that the ISP won't be able to know what application is running over the pipe.
- In response to the above, Roger's and a few other ISP's have begun throttling all encrypted traffic (eg. in some cases, HTTPS, encrypted email, VPN's, etc, may be inadvertently slowed down by the same algorithm)
- Clearly, the next step is to not only try to make the data streams look more like standard applications (eg. if they've managed to figure out HTTPS data from other data, then make P2P look exactly like HTTPS data), steganography-style (though not to the extent that it makes you transmit significantly more data)