Deep Packet Inspection and Bandwidth Management: Battles Over Bittorrent in Canada and the United States

Abstract

Two case studies explore the reciprocal influence between technological change and Internet governance. Both focus on the use by Internet service providers of a new capability known as deep packet inspection (DPI) to “throttle” or restrict the speed of BitTorrent uploads or downloads by their customers. We show that in both cases, these implementations led to public protests, litigation and major regulatory proceedings. In both cases, network neutrality norms were used to challenge DPI deployments. The paper’s descriptive comparison is supplemented by quantitative data drawn from the use of Glasnost, a network test that allows third parties to detect BitTorrent throttling via DPI.