Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination: Encryption

NUTS AND BOLTS OF NET DISCRIMINATION: ENCRYPTION
[SOURCE: Freedom to Tinker, AUTHOR: Ed Felten]
[Commentary] Perhaps encryption can play a role in the net neutrality debate. If users encrypt their packets, the encrypted packets will all look like gibberish to the ISP, so the ISP won't be able to tell one type of packet from another. This could force the ISP to handle all of the user’s packets in the same way. The ISP can still penalize all of the user’s packets, or it can single out randomly chosen packets for special treatment, but those are the only forms of discrimination available to it. The user and the ISP are playing an interesting game of chicken. The ISP wants to discriminate against some of the user’s packets, but doesn't want to inconvenience the user so badly that the user discontinues the service (or demands a much lower price). The user responds by making his packets indistinguishable and daring the ISP to discriminate against all of them. The ISP can back down, by easing off on discrimination in order to keep the user happy -- or the ISP can call the user’s bluff and hamper all or most of the user’s traffic. But the ISP may have a different and more effective strategy. If the ISP wants to hamper a particular application, and there is a way to manipulate the user’s traffic that affects that application much more than it does other applications, then the ISP has a way to punish the targeted application. So it turns out that even using encryption isn't necessarily enough to shield a user from network discrimination. Discrimination can work in subtle ways.
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