Friday 14 December 2012

ITU and their lost battle to charge YouTube

ITU's Final acts of the World Conference on International Telecommunications, Dubai 2012, is out. 

Besides begging for money and trying to stay relevant, the ITU ratified 'Deep Packet Inspection' (DPI). They also managed to insert this gem: "optionally requires DPI systems to support inspection of encrypted traffic “in case of a local availability of the used encryption key(s).” [1]

What that means is that should your ISP magically come into possession of say your private keys, they are allowed to decrypt your email, communications etc. that you used to encrypt it, forever without telling you.

Their shameless money grab was left for last, on page 23 of the Final Acts titled 'International telecommunication service traffic termination and exchange'. It recognises that dedicated phone and data has moved to IP based networks and many Member States are asking for their authorised operating agencies to invoice service providers. In other words, many Governments are asking, on behalf of their state-run-money-losing telecos, to invoice YouTube for sending traffic to their users. 

The sooner these governments accept the fact that state run telcos are worse than state run airlines, the sooner they can stop begging YouTube for money and implement an open platform for all telecommunication firms to flourish.

Source:
[1] https://www.cdt.org/blogs/cdt/2811adoption-traffic-sniffing-standard-fans-wcit-flames