Ask HN: What are engineering solutions to preserve Net Neutrality? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are engineering solutions to preserve Net Neutrality?

5 pointswavesounds9 comments

What is a practical engineering solution to prevent ISPs from monitoring/filtering a users internet traffic? And what Open Source projects can we contribute to help build this solution?

It must be something that has the potential of being mainstream and can't easily be shut down.

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You could use a VPN to prevent an ISP from filtering your traffic, but that doesn't solve the problem of ISPs being able to give preferential treatment to certain sites. For example, if your ISP gives preferential treatment to sites A, B and C, then they'll just slow down any service that's not going to one of those sites, which includes any VPN traffic whose destination they can't determine.

What if Netflix hosted a VPN? Instead of paying comcast $5 for ever website I want to visit, I just pay comcast for Netflix and use the VPN that comes with my Netflix subscription to get everything else for free?

Even if this worked, it still wouldn't be good. You've simply replaced Comcast with Netflix.

When wireless gets good enough to replace most home set ups, being an ISP will become a race to the bottom, and I have to imagine that Net Neutrality (audited by someone reputable) will be a consumer demand that helps differentiate.

Domain Fronting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting

What are the limitations of this? How come it hasn't taken off?

"This can be done if the blocked and the innocuous sites are both hosted by the same large provider"

Netflix probably doesn't host other people's sites.

One problem that needs to be addressed is that of overhead. It's silly to add an additional layer just to circumvent censorship. Although that's what is being tried in China with mixed results.

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