Net Neutrality A Key Battleground In Growing Fight Over Encryption, Activists Say

Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, says Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank.

Encrypted traffic can't be given special treatment because it can't be identified, said Meinrath. That could eliminate a major revenue source for ISPs, giving them a strong reason to oppose the use of encrypted services and potentially an indirect way to degrade their performance, he said. Because of the way network discrimination could affect encrypted services, guaranteeing Net neutrality will be critical to ensuring consumers' right to privacy online,

Meinrath wrote with policy activist Sean Vitka in Critical Studies in Media Communication. Both authors of the study also call for regulators to keep control of communications in the hands of users and in their own devices at the edge of networks, giving consumers the power to encrypt their communications from end to end.