You are here





In this increasingly heightened cybersecurity context, it is ironic that the FCC's first net neutrality decision concerning its Broadband Policy Statement was a highly controversial 3-2 decision that indicated that P2P application traffic may not be subject to focused network management and that P2P applications were like any other Internet application. 

  • However, to the extent that P2P applications continue to be the primary source of many of the most severe Internet security problems -- from national security sensitive data breaches, to mass IP content piracy, to mass privacy/identity theft vulnerabilities, to widespread denial-of-service attacks and outages, to frequent bot-net zombie takeovers, to the rapid spread of viruses, worms and malware -- the FCC will increasingly have to heavily weigh Internet security factors in determining what constitutes the presumed boundaries of reasonable network management.
  • The view that any bit interference is presumed in advance to be an act of  bad faith and a violation of net neutrality and the spirit of an open Internet -- is becoming increasingly extreme, irresponsible, and dangerous in this environment.
  • That extreme view fosters a climate where bad actors believe they can act with impunity and no accountability and Internet users are expected to fend for themselves -- and increasingly vulnerable and un-protected from harms that disproportionately happen via P2P applications.

  See previous parts of this series on "The Open Internet's Growing Security Problems" here:  I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, & XIII.