Shaw « Deep Packet Inspection.
I do believe that DPI and related technologies will be abused by ISPs and media conglomerates if they are allowed to do so – and also that they should not have the option to arbitrarily favour one technology over another (as eg when Shaw says that internet delivery is “not a substitute” for cableTV). But technologies like bittorrent and skype do create speed by using extra bandwidth, and this does give the ISPs an opening to claim that they sometimes need to throttle certain kinds of traffic. However that claim is only valid becuse their chosen pricing model does not increase the cost for high bandwidth users. If we do not want to give the ISPs the authority to manage traffic volumes based on content-type (which they will certainly abuse) then we need to accept that bandwidth is a commodity in limited supply and should be paid for on a usage basis. This would have the effect of allowing market pressure to favour technologies which have less impact without giving anyone the power to arbitrarily favour their own technology or content.