Sorry for this somewhat off-topic question, but I think this issue is at
least vaguely related to Internet engineering.
I suspect that my colleagues and I are not the only ones viewing with
alarm various practices of ISPs serving residential users that generally
conflict with the traditional openness and neutrality of Internet
infrastructure. We started to put together a list of
must/should/shouldn't/mustn't in terms of ISP technical practices, along
the lines of:
principal purpose is transporting packets expeditiously
should not constrain customer use of network, except to limit malicious
or illegal use
shouldn't block ports except with permission, or to stop imminent attack
should support multicast and IPv6
should not either require or prohibit NAT or VPN use
etc, for potential use as criteria against which local ISP behavior could
be judged (in the case of regulated monopolies in particular). So the
questions are:
* does anyone know of such a set of recommendations already written
down somewhere?
* are there discussion forums or other venues where people are working
on this kind of thing?
Far be it from me to try to constrain the behavior of participants on this
list, but let me suggest that discussion of the technical merits of the
above points or the general wisdom of this effort is probably not
appropriate for the IETF list ...
Thanks,
- RL "Bob"