EU Net Neutrality Study Recommends: "Do not impose any further NN obligations"

  

In April we saw some statements from  Neelie Kroes , European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, regarding Net Neutrality (see "EU: "It's not OK for Skype and other such services to be throttled" - here).

However, during May, another report was published by the European Parliament Policy Department/Economic and Scientific Policy - "Network Neutrality: Challenges and responses in the EU and in the U.S" - here, following a request from the European Parliament's Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO).

The 71-pages document ".. analytical study provides background on the debate over network neutrality, including (1) its technological and economic underpinnings, (2) the implications for business models going forward, and (3) the legal, regulatory, policy and business responses that have been attempted and that are currently in play. It includes a comparison between the US, where these issues have been debated intensely, and the EU"

Among the recommendations are:

• Do not impose any further network neutrality obligations until there is sufficient experience with the obligations already imposed through the 2009 amendments to the regulatory framework to make a reasoned judgment about their effectiveness;
   
• Support both technical and policy research to enhance the effectiveness of the consumer transparency obligations, and to ensure that the minimum QoS obligations can be effectively imposed should they prove to be needed; 

DPI: Skype Protocol Source Available for Download

 

Efim Bushmanov, a freelance researcher, posted to his blog "You have unique chance to take a look on skype internal protocol and encryption. You will see what it uses strong AES and RSA encryption with public key infrastructure .. most of hard things already done(for 1.x/3.x/4.x versions of skype). Including rc4 and arithmetic compression .. It will not work at all on any 5.x skype and will not work for 3.x/4.x without new 'login' certificate(they call it 'credentials'). Cert issued by skype login server each time when you enter password, or once in around 30 days if you mark 'remember password' checkbox".

See "Skype protocol reverse engineered, source available for download" - here and "Some words about how to test this" - here.
 

How long will it take skype to make the necessary changes? DPI vendors are challenging the protocol for several years now (see "Is it Possible to Block Skype with DPI ?" - here) and Skype always comes up with one more thing, keeping the vendors away from full decoding (for example - identifying the media type used so voice could be discriminated, while other media session wont).

Anyway, in the meantime some people may (?) find this valuable, at least as reading material.