It started with Dutch mobile service providers publicly admitting that they are, and have been for a while, doing deep packet inspection on their customers' traffic1.
DPI is a technology for looking inside internet protocol packets to find out what kind of data is actually being transmitted. DPI can tell the difference between an e-mail and a tweet and a WhatsApp message, for example.
The mobile providers do this to find out if us sneaky mobile internet users are using services like voice-over-IP and online texting instead of paid-for regular phone calls and text messages.
As I've written before, I'm fairly square when it comes to property rights and fairly pessimistic where it concerns privacy. Deep packet inspection, and post-paying for bandwidth used on skype and WhatsApp troubles me deeply. I buy bandwidth for market prices do use as I see fit, and that's how the provider used to sell it.
The service providers are scared of loosing revenue and would rather conservatively repress free use of the bandwidth they are selling than go with the times and re-focus their business on what the consumer is asking for: freely useable bandwidth. History, it seems, has not elucidated obsoleteness enough, but the providers are generous in giving it ample opportunity time and again.
Now politicians have smelled controversy and votes, and several have taken side with the users to guarantee free use of bandwidth. Count on Dutch politicians to side with the little guy :).
Concurrently, four hours drive south of The Hague the G8 summit has been, by and large, advocating the direct opposite: monitor, inspect, regulate, police internet users and bill the bleep out of those nasty little consumers2. If they need privacy they are up to no good. If they share content they are stealing. If they use cheaper service is is a dangerous abuse of market self-regulation and everything should be done to protect obsolete revenue models. Guess how this is to be achieved? Right, DPI again.
So the guardians of intellectual property and the guardians of obsolete revenue models are united in a common goal: to inspect, log, and give consequence to the content of each internet protocol package going in and out of your computer, laptop and mobile, ever.
Interesting.
According to Cisco3, last year an average 237 petabytes was transmitted by mobile users per month. Good luck monitoring all that. That's a lot of packets to inspect. Will consumers be asked to field the price tag of their own repression? Higher prices, less functionality. Great business model.
Meanwhile Dutch minister Verhagen is industriously campaigning against the (ab)use of deep packet inspection by Dutch providers, citing privacy concerns. In his scenario regulation would be used for, rather than against the consumer's interests. Although I agree with his motivation (more
I'd like to think a daring provider will do the same thing to mobile bandwidth that Apple did to digital music: put a fair price on extensive usage rights, and re-invent the market. I'm not holding my breath though. Who'd dare go down the deep end?
1: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/12/dutch-telco-kpn-using-deep-packet-inspection-to-monitor-mobile-c/
2: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13553943
3: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/
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