Torrent of Abuse...

The BBC recently ran an excellent apology for a Newsnight piece that equated encryption of BitTorrent and other torrent programs as aiding terrorists and criminals.
I didn't see the original program, but the piece by Adam Livingstone put the issue in very plain language...
If 30% of internet traffic is the various torrent traffic, and it is all encrypted, then what hope to the authorities have of monitoring it and decrypting it. Indeed.
The plain fact is that monitoring of internet 'conversation' or transactions, is just not a practical proposition any more.
Just look at the nature programs showing the majestic herds of Wildebeeste sweeping across the plains of Africa. Would you be able to track the movements and behaviour of Joe W. Wildebeeste? No, I didn't think so.
Phone tapping was a luxury that had it's technological moment and it has now gone, law enforcement needs to find other ways to determine wrongdoing.

The Adam Livingstone article raised another interesting (if somewhat obvious to techies) point, which was that encrypted traffic is not service differentiated, i.e. as an ISP you can't tell what my bits are related to, so you can't filter out applications that you don't want me to use.
Just like the Power company can't tell whether I am using my electricity to power my toaster or my kettle, and therefore just supplies me with electricity! It's a simple utility.

The BBC seemed to think that this is a problem, but it's only relevant if you believe that the authorities have a right to monitor what you are doing (especially via the automated systems that are currently being implemented).
Encryption, coupled with the use of ports that are commonly in use and P2P or federated server systems, ensures that all services are treated equally, the ISP or telco can't start to discriminate in favour of some services. Of course, they could de-prioritise all unknown encrypted traffic, but I somehow doubt whether that would be acceptable to the customer.
There are things the telco could do to regain control, but in my view, the internet has developed past the point where they are practical. If the telcos had provided a decent partnership package (I don't want to say platform!) back in 1999 or 2000, then it might have been successful, but the bio-diversity of the internet is now beyond control of one group.

It's going to take some kind of apocalyptic event to put the internet back in the bottle, net neutrality or not.
Do Bell South, AT&T and SBC look like Three of the Four Riders to you?