Lesson from Iran: Controlling Internet Use Is a Slippery Slope

App Performance View

There was an ominous juxtaposition of two articles about controlling Internet use in the June 17th issue of the Wall Street Journal. One article described how the Iranian government is using deep packet inspection to spy on and limit its citizens' Internet use--and the other described how the UK is about to mandate the use of deep packet inspection to identify and crack down on piracy.  We see the two news items as variants on a theme, and we see a lesson to be learned. We worry that our English-speaking brethren are sliding down a slippery slope that could easily lead to spying and quashing online activities deemed by the state to be "subversive" or "criminal."

Perceptions of good and bad depend on your point of view. Iran's current use of deep packet inspection and traffic management based on content is clearly bad in our view--although the Iranian authorities clearly think otherwise.  Parents and schools use the same technology to limit children's access to inappropriate content like pornography and companies use it to limit employees' access to YouTube, and most would say that is OK.

We see the fact that the UK's Ofcom (the equivalent of our FCC) is poised to force ISPs to "spy" on users to determine if they are illegally downloading copyrighted material as bad.  Under the plan, ISPs will be required to send a warning letter to an errant customer that can threaten him or her with court action.  If the customer does not desist within a year, the Ofcom can instruct the ISP to limit the customer's allocated bandwidth.

Although some might think it is an appropriate response to illegal piracy, here's why the UK legislation worries us. It's a matter of scale and control. Once UK's ISPs implement deep packet inspection (for the benefit of the movie industry in this case), all the tools are in place to implement Iranian government style spying into and control over what citizens see and do.

While applying deep packet inspection on a small scale in individual homes, schools and office buildings is unlikely to lead to major civil liberties infractions, the danger of misuse rises sharply when the technology is applied on a massive scale with nation-wide deployment.  The new Ofcom plan will deploy the technology in such a way that the UK government could centrally monitor and control traffic at every broadband consumer location across an entire nation.

This will create a potential "weapon of mass information destruction."  Once created, we can only hope that someone sometime does not subject UK residents to the tactics currently in effect in Iran.  Keep in mind that Iran's justification for implementing the technology was to protect its citizens from the "evils" of pornography.  At the time, that probably sounded just fine to Iranians who today wish their votes to be counted and their voices to be heard.

• Network Management
• Application Performance Management
• Internet
• net neutrality