Rogers, a prominent ISP in Canada, has done something interesting:

For the past 18 months, it has been open secret that Rogers engages in packet shaping, conduct that limits the amount of available bandwidth for certain services such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications. Rogers denied the practice at first, but effectively acknowledged it in late 2005. Net neutrality advocates regularly point to traffic shaping as a concern since they fear that Rogers could limit bandwidth to competing content or services. In response to the packet shaping approach, many file sharing applications now employ encryption to make it difficult to detect the contents of data packets. This has led to a technical “cat and mouse” game, with Rogers now one of the only ISPs in the world to simply degrade encrypted traffic.

— The Unintended Consequences of Rogers’ Packet Shaping, Michael Geist, Law Bytes, 5 April 2007

Why degrade encrypted traffic? Because traffic these days is encrypted to prevent flow shaping on it. Slowing down all encrypted traffic catches that, including unauthorized movie sharing and the like. However, it also catches legal and authorized encrypted traffic. For example, I always log in on my remote computers using ssh, which is encrypted. This is for privacy. So is Rogers now making privacy slow?

Packet shaping doesn’t have to be a problem with net neutrality, but in this case it looks like it is.

-jsq