The uneducated .. (Score 2, Insightful)

.. boggle my mind.

Here's what I say to all you paranoid conspiracy freaks ..

go ahead and encrypt your dang traffic. The Internet companies don't really care about the CONTENT of your traffic.

Rather, they want to know what TYPE of traffic you're using - file transfer, web browsing, voice, video.

You think I'm wrong that they don't care about your content. I'm sure you think I'm wrong - because every one of you posting on this thread is f*cking paranoid.

But I can tell you first hand - they don't give a damn.

You also don't want them using DPI to sell you stuff, or to hinder access to competing products.

Fine .. they all provide opt-out capabilities for sales pitches .. and simple legislation would suffice to keep them from slowing down, say, skype, on their network.

They can do many legit things with this data. For example ..

1. Yes, they can set the QoS for you, so that video and voice can be allocated high priority, low latency resources, while file transfers can be assigned to more appropriate resources.

2. They can trend the patterns of traffic in their network, fine tuning it for the type of data being sent, and adding capacity prior to bottlenecks occurring.

3. They can more precisely understand events on their network - e.g., associating the release of a new version of some browser, or video player, or VOIP tool, or social website, etc. with a sudden rise in traffic on their network.

For them, it is all about understanding what TYPES of applications run over their network. It is NOT about reading your email or facebook profile - they really couldn't give a sh*t about that.

So, DPI technology has the potential for abuse? Sure .. and I'm sure some countries will try to take advantage of that.

Does that frighten you? OK .. then by all means, go ahead and use encryption and port hopping !!! Contrary to what 99.99% of you on this board believe - encryption and port hopping won't prevent DPI and similar technologies from identifying WHAT you're doing. It does hide the content, for sure - which is what you want, right?

So, buzz off already about this net neuter stuff. You can have your privacy. The companies can have their trending analysis tools. These things are NOT mutually exclusive.