[Asdfbla]

As someone only superficially familiar with networking, I think it would be interesting to know what impact the current packet inspection practices by the middleboxes have on network performance. After all, the article mentions that those middleboxes want to control the message flow and use that as justification. The assumption behind QUIC seems to be that there's no "global" benefit in that specific kind of network management and that it's mostly selfish interests of local network operators that motivate messing with the packets?

Basically, what are the incentives of the middleboxes to inspect packages and what do they really stand to lose?

[signa11]

> interesting to know what impact the current packet inspection practices by the middleboxes have on network performance.

well, all (almost ?) current boxes can do that at line rate for minimal sized packets.

> incentives of the middleboxes to inspect packages(sic)

incentive is for charging / billing / steering packet flows etc.

[Asdfbla]

I probably expressed that wrong, I was more wondering if the packet sniffing had any beneficial impact on the performance in the sense of QoS or congestion control or something like that. After all, they have to do it for a reason.

But your second points mentions it's for billing and such, so I guess that's my answer.

[woah]

I don’t think it’s for billing most of the time. The middleboxes usually provide some kind of immediate benefit to the network, while breaking core networking assumptions and thus contributing to a weird form of technical debt.