As an interesting addendum to the last post on crowdsourcing regulation of network neutrality (or alternatively, monitoring discrimination)--- A company is already offering up a service to do the monitoring.
Kaminsky calls his technique "TCP-based Active Probing for Faults." He says that the software he's developing will...track what path Internet traffic takes as it hops between two machines on different ends of the network.
...Kaminsky's software will be able to make traffic appear as if it is coming from a particular carrier, or being used for a certain type of application, like VoIP. It will also be able to identify where the traffic is being dropped, and could ultimately be used to finger service providers who are treating some network traffic as second-class.
He will release his own, more sophisticated software sometime within the next six months as part of a free suite of tools called Paketto Keiretsu, version 3, he said.
The security researcher said he is curious to see what people do with his software. "People are going to start looking [at networks] and who knows what they are going to find," he said.
Already a handful of carriers have tried blocking certain types of Internet services. In March 2005, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fined Madison River Communications US$15,000 for blocking Vonage's VoIP service, but the FCC has since changed its broadband carrier requirements and it's unclear whether it would again issue a similar fine.
Kaminsky believes that net neutrality will eventually become law, and that the type of software he is developing will help keep the carriers honest. "If you're going to enforce by law that networks be neutral, the question becomes, 'How do you test for this?'" he said. "I'm going to make sure that the tools are going to be in place."
link, Kaminsky's research
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