The Coming Data Obfuscation Arms Race.

FCC Commissioner McDowell presented at the Tech Policy Summit pointing to the recently announced Comcast/Bittorrent "solution" whereby Comcast would stop degrading Bittorrent traffic as a huge success. Personally, I think the so-called solution does nothing to protect end-users from future malfeasance by network operators, so I asked Commissioner McDowell what the FCC is doing to prevent what will certainly become a data obfuscation arms race from developing. Here's the problem in a few easy-to-understand steps:

1. A network operator discriminates against certain types of traffic.

2. End users begin to encrypt their traffic and pass data from applications and/or services that are discriminated against through an encrypted tunnel (e.g., VPN, SSH, etc.).

3. The network operator is now forced into a fairly problematic decision -- if they don't discriminate against encrypted traffic, more and more services and applications will encrypt their traffic; but if they do discriminate against encrypted traffic, they're saying, in essence, that if you want privacy, you will get worse service.

4. Meanwhile, corporations that rely upon VPN for their everyday dealings, will scream bloody murder; so then network operators are forced into an even more dastardly decision -- discriminate wholesale against classes of users. In other words, all residential-class users will be foisted off into a low-priority tier of service.

So how can this be avoided?

Build capacity.

A great resource discussing the rationality of this solution is David Levinson and Andrew Odlyzko's, "Too expensive to meter: The influence of transaction costs in transportation and communication". But the main issue is that building capacity is the best solution for end users, while the tiering and further commodification of existing bandwidth comes at the literal expense of end users.