Isn't blocking any port against the idea of Net Neutrality?
Yes.
Owen
No. The idea of net neutrality, in this context, is for service providers to avoid making arbitrary decisions about the services that a customer will be allowed. Blocking 25, or 137-139, etc., are common steps taken to promote the security of the network. This is not an arbitrary decision (and I am defining it this way; I will not play semantics about "arbitrary". Read along and figure out what I mean.) For 25, SMTP has proven to be a protocol that has adapted poorly to modern life, and a variety of issues have conspired that make it undesirable to allow random home PC's to use 25. Reasonable alternatives exist, such as using 587, or the ISP's mail server. A customer isn't being disallowed the use of SMTP to send mail (which WOULD be a problem). A customer may use any number of other mail servers to send mail. Not a serious issue, and not arbitrary... it's generally considered a good, or even best current, practice. Blocking VoIP from your network to Vonage, because you want your customers to buy your own VoIP service? That's a very clear problem. There's no justifiable reason that any viable broadband service provider would have for blocking VoIP. Yet there could be a reason to forbid VoIP; I can, for example, imagine some of the rural WISP setups where the loads caused on the infrastructure interfere with providing service. Similarly, it'd be ridiculous to expect an 802.11b based rural WISP to be able to support HD Netflix streaming, or dialup ISP's to be able to support fast downloading of movies. These are not arbitrary restrictions, but rather technological ones. When you buy a 56k dialup, you should expect you won't get infinite speed. When you buy WISP access on a shared 802.11b setup, you should expect that you're sharing that theoretical max 11Mbps with other subs. It gets murkier when you get into situations such as where your cableco has sold you a 15Mbps Internet connection, but proceeds to "traffic engineer" your activities down to a slower speed. There are real questions that should be addressed; for example, if you are paying extra for a "premium" service (as in when the default speed is 7Mbps and you've upgraded), should a customer expect that they will actually get substantially more capacity? How does the reliance on overcommit affect things? The ideal is to sell a high speed connection to someone who uses none of it, of course... but if you're selling lots of capacity, and betting that only a little will be used at a time, and you've guessed wrong, the big question is, is that tolerable, or is net neutrality going to force you to provide what you've sold? So, now, back to blocking... many service providers block 80, on the basis that they don't want customers running servers. This could very well be a net neutrality issue. It's probably not a security issue. It's a decision being made at a business level, in order to promote the purchase of "business class" services. It's an arbitrary decision about what a customer will be allowed to do. There's lots of interesting stuff to think about. Net neutrality isn't going to mean that we kill BCP38 and port 25 filtering. It is about service providers arbitrarily interfering with the service that they're providing. Customers should be given, to the maximum extent reasonably possible, Internet connectivity suitable for general purpose use. Where service providers start infringing on that, that's what should be addressed by network neutrality. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.