Intellectual Property Law

Deep packet inspection

By Susan Crawford

Here is testimony from David Reed at a hearing today.  Please read it - not only is it both excellent and thorough, it’s also only ten pages long.

David says (paraphrase mine - read the testimony) that because of the inappropriate surprise, disruption, and risks created by DPI, it shouldn’t be allowed.  (Or we should move to all-encrypted communications.)  He also makes the key and constant point that the internet has flourished because transport was, traditionally, predictable.  This allowed innovative new protocols to be born.  (This battle can sometimes be framed as a right-to-life tussle on behalf of as-yet-unborn technologies.)

Of course this tradition of predictable transport didn’t start with the internet.  The challenge for the entire argument against DPI is to tie the meaning of predictable transport, and its contribution to economic growth, to a workable legal regime that politicians will be willing to endorse.  Arguments from history are powerful (and there are certainly many of them here).  Arguments for the future are harder, and David Reed’s contribution here is powerful.

Implementation is tricky - in this case, a “no DPI” approach gets involved (potentially) with national security, child porn, and copyright concerns.  At the least, “no DPI by network operators for their own commercial benefit” has to be the rule.  And for those other problems, legally-authorized (with probable cause) access to individual data streams has to be a better idea than inspecting every last packet.

This story is only just beginning.

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on July 17, 2008 (boomark / email).