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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

The carriers shouldn't even have any visibility to what is being carried, beyond what is necessary to route it to its destination.

Just like I don't want snail mail carriers opening my letters (even if it is strictly for the purpose of deciding whether or not they are important for speedy delivery).

There should be a protocol in which as much as possible is hidden. Even things like port numbers. From the traffic pattern it will usually be obvious whether it is bulk or interactive and such, and it has to be addressed, but beyond that, what protocol it is using, what port number and all that should be shrouded from prying eyes. If I have two connections going to the same host, it should not be possible for a wiretapper to tell which packets belong to which connection only "host A sent some blob to host B".

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> The carriers shouldn't even have any visibility to what is being carried, beyond what is necessary to route it to its destination.

> Just like I don't want snail mail carriers opening my letters

Agreed

> Just like I don't want snail mail carriers opening my letters (even if it is strictly for the purpose of deciding whether or not they are important for speedy delivery).

But you can pay for express delivery in which case your package is delivered over the other packages. Isn't that a good analogy of non-NN world?

If postal packages arrived in milliseconds, there would be no need for express delivery.

No, the non-NN analogy would be if you wanted to send/receive packages with Amazon it would be one price, and with someone else it would be another price.

You do know that Amazon does that right? Some sellers offer free shipping, but their price reflects the added shipping.

Before you say 'I meant UPS charging one price to one manufacturer, and another to another', then UPS does that too. You can be very certain that UPS charges Amazon much lower shipping fee (due to the bulk business) than an independent seller on Amazon.

Vendors have been charging different fees to different businesses since forever, and we never had a problem mostly because nobody ever finds it more profitable to charge for printing Bible more than printing Sears catalog just because they don't like Bible.

The content of the communication can be (and many times is) encrypted. Encryption is irrelevant here. You still need addresses of the local and remote to make the connection happen. That plus some pretty simple heuristics are all that is needed to make an informed guess into the nature of media in transit.

You could spin this argument in the other direction and say that the contents in the pipe should be extremely visible and transparent to everybody. It would be a complete violation of privacy, but it will also identify (to everybody) the kinds of traffic flowing and the costs of that traffic in terms of congestion (if any).

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