Award Winning Blog

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Network Neutrality and Packet Sniffing

I have just completed the draft of a paper on the impact of deep packet inspection on the Network Neutrality debate and digital rights management. It's available on my web site: http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/r/m/rmf5/
and in a day or two in pdf. at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=102928.

In a nutshell I sugest that sniffing packet headers may disqualify ISPs from safe harbor copyright liability exemptions, because the ISP will have every opportunity to read (and comply with) DRM instructions. The potential disqualification raises some of the costs an ISP might have to incur in its quest to operate non-neutral networks, i.e., neterworks that use deep packet inspection to tier services by prices and QOS.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this paper.