Dutch Provider KPN Under Fire Over DPI 77
An anonymous reader writes "After Dutch internet/mobile provider KPN announced they were going to blatantly do away with the idea of net-neutrality by charging their customers for using text message replacements (such as WhatsApp) to make up for diminishing use of traditional text-messaging, it has now been revealed that they have apparently employed deep packet inspection (DPI) to monitor customers' use of WhatsApp (and also VoIP services) — which happens to be illegal in the Netherlands. Many national news outlets are now finally reporting on the issue. Some doubts exists on whether it was actually DPI that was used to measure WhatsApp use (and not just IP/TCP header inspection), while some KPN insiders suggested it is actually an outsourced operation run by Alcatel-Lucent." Update: 05/13 20:26 GMT by S : The Dutch equivalent of the EFF has recommended that users report this to the police, and explained how to go about doing so (Google translation of Dutch original).
Dutch government mandates DPI from all ISPs (Score:4, Informative)
All Dutch (and European?) ISPs are required by law to retain e-mail headers and URLs accessed for a number of years (anti-terrorism, anti-pedophiles, the usual reasons), which I think is only possible with DPI, so I suppose all Dutch ISPs are doing DPI, in a far more intrusive way than KPN and Vodafone are using it for their own interests. I'm sad that it is only now that people are suddenly outraged, but I guess its better than nothing at all. I'm far more concerned about KPN trying to make a profit from other people's services (WhatsApp) just because people are realizing traditional text-messaging sucks balls.
actually, the new acronym for DPI is TPM (Score:5, Informative)
The equipment vendors are aware that "deep packet inspection" has negative connotations, and at least some of them are now using the term "traffic and policy management" or TPM.
Doesn't that sound nice and innocuous?