| Verizon's excuse for Skype limitations on their phones has to do with following – wait for it – FCC regulations to support law-enforcement monitoring: http://connectedplanetonline.com/mobile-apps/news/verizon-sk... So the Feds/FCC are not going to ride to your rescue as a Skype user with noble-minded net-neutrality regulations. Quite probably, greater involvement by the FCC in defining what legitimate, 'neutral' internet service is will grow over time to be only that service that's 'responsible', that logs data for law enforcement, that enforces child-friendly content-blocking, and so forth. A long-dead concept from the Clinton Administration – mandated backdoors into all private encryption, remember the Clipper Chip? – was recently revived by the Obama Administration: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html There is a risk that eventually, only packets that can be made transparent to the authorities on demand will be considered 'neutral', and ISPs will be required to block any other deeply opaque traffic, by the same agency now portrayed as some white knight. The FCC is not the friend of internet or communications freedom. |
Why should it be different for wireless carriers vs. wired? I guess the FBI needs to move their Carniv- um, DCS-1000 machines into Verizon, Sprint and ATT data centers, too. Actually, I'm sure they have that covered already. There's no need for different rules for wired carriers vs. wireless. Internet traffic is internet traffic. They'll decode it regardless of how you send it to your access point.