The fly in the oinment is what some of the users are using their allowance for. This has allowed Telstra to go “yeah but”.

The problem with Telstra (or any ISP) doing this is it opens a _huge_ can of worms in terms of liability, which is why I’m surprised they explicitly call out copyright infringement, even if only in a blog post.

It’s one thing to say you’re shaping traffic to maximise network capacity and improve the overall user experience. Moreover in nearly all cases this doesn’t - despite commentary above to the contrary - require snooping into your network traffic equivalent to reading your mail.

However, it’s quite another thing to say you’ll be shaping network traffic based on your (note: not an actual legal judgement) assessment on whether or not users are breaking the law. Therein lies a long, slippery slope of escalating lawsuits of both a) false detections and b) “victims” of crime try to make you responsible for allowing everything from bullying to credit card fraud over their internet connection.

Maybe the day is approaching when people are going to have to work harder for their freebies. Having said that drsmithy might have another opinion. If he has time….?

The easiest way to circumvent this sort of traffic shaping - at least for now - is to get yourself an offshore VPN provider (to an endpoint that doesn’t shape traffic, of course !) and do everything you think might be shaped over that VPN. Though that does come back to the same problem of well-known endpoints, and ISPs might simply take to shaping any traffic going to those “dodgy” VPN endpoints (though that does open a similar can of worms as above).

Those users paid for the service. If it’s slowing down other users, then it’s Telstra’s fault for not providing the capacity for which they’ve happily taken their customers’ money to provide.

Users haven’t paid for SLA guaranteed performance. Their connectivity is implicitly oversubscribed.

You can pay for guaranteed, dedicated bandwidth if you want, but you’ll be paying a LOT for it.

It’ll be interesting to see how they deal with usenet traffic, given that any ‘pirate’ prepared to pay a nominal subscription fee left torrents for the superior encrypted usenet servers long ago.

Known ports and destination IPs ? Doesn’t get much simpler…

“Thank you for your e-mail. After checking with our Level 2 engineers, we can confirm that we do no use DPI for separating p2p traffic. I hope this answers your question.”

They might have decided to have avoided this sort of technology (DPI) at all costs if they had thought it through. Prima Facie, it seems to make them somewhat responsible for the downloads that there customers make, and in so doing liable. At least it seems to me that this argument could be made.

They would, without any legal training at all behind me, I think be better off if they didn’t steam open every letter to see what was inside it. I’m fairly sure that was one telco used as a defence when it was sued for being a carrier for file sharing (iinet???)

Any Lawywers out there?

“Implementing DPI makes it completely clear that they aren’t even pretending to be common carriers any more,” he said.

hmm. Doesn’t mean we have to like them…