[IP] It ain't the Internet Panama begins blocking IP ports to prevent VoIP

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 17:45:51 -0500

Subject: Re: <[IP]> Panama begins blocking IP ports to prevent VoIP

The Panama "UDP Port block" is interesting from a technical point of view.

Routers are not supposed to inspect anything outside the IP header in
making their routing decisions.   That's what the Internet standard says.

If some device looks at the UDP data (which technically means the first few
bytes of the data in an IP datagram that has a particular protocol number),
it is not a router.   It is something that is sometimes called a
"middlebox".

What Panama is doing is asking for the Internet to be redesigned and
rearchitected in order to inflict a policy that relates to
competition.  The result is not the Internet.

It is important for the IAB and IETF to point out to the government of
Panama that the service they are asking to be deployed is NOT the
Internet.   It violates the Internet standards, by incorporating an
end-to-end protocol into the routers between adminstrative domains.

This is not trivial.  The Internet architecture is designed so that the IP
transport layer does not need to know, and cannot know, the meaning of the
bits contained in the data portion of the datagrams.


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