Thank you for clearing it up. I had already seen this on Slashdot the other day and was looking for someone to fix all the miserable reporting errors.
Now, for where the “free and family-friendly” nonsense comes in: there is a thoroughly dopey proposal out there in Congress, championed by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) to made the carrier winning the bid on these AWS-III brand auction to provide free, “family friendly” wireless access, with a minimum level of service of 200kB/sec download speeds.
This, of course, represents a complete fantasy on the parts of the sponsors of this goofy bill.
I don't think it's fantasy, and it's not without precedent. Network television is subject to decency regulations for what goes over their public airwaves, and having an advertiser-supported public digital network is a fairly similar circumstance. Also, owning that spectrum means big $$$ with zero content investment, so decency hurdles, especially since they will probably be web-only and the tech is pretty well-established, are probably barely a factor for whoever wins.
Filtering content at the ISP level is complete fantasy. As soon as you try opening the content of an IP stream to spot what is a T&A jpeg vs. a Ansel Adams picture, there’s no way in Hades you can maintain any sort of bandwidth. Zippo, nada, zilch.
The speed of packet switching in the modern IP network rests on the premise that we don’t need to dig too deeply into the content of each packet. Right now, things like routers and switches are looking only as deep as the TCP header, and that’s pretty rare. Most of the time they’re doing nothing more than the IP header. The content that these idiots want to filter is deep within the TCP payload - and the TCP payload could be split across multiple IP frames, which would require that routers (either the WiFi routers, which are usually really anemic in CPU and memory) or the access routers that are feeding the WiFi routers, re-assemble TCP packets to re-form the payload so it could be inspected.
I’ve worked on devices that have done this for security applications - things like stateful intrusion detection boxes. They can handle perhaps a 100Mbps ethernet worth of bandwidth, but they’re looking for a series of “attack signatures” that requires they look at only a few bytes here or there.
Filtering out video/picture/audio content on a TCP session.... no way. This ain’t like TV or radio, where it is a one-way stream.
Can it be done? Yes, if you give me an nearly infinite budget for R&D, bleeding edge hardware, rack upon rack of CPU, etc. If I’m giving away the service and charging for only the advertisement(s), there’s no hope for ever recovering this level of investment. Ad-based revenue works well when you have something like Yahoo or Google, and you have very little incremental cost per user. When you’re inspecting everyone’s TCP stream for throbbing naughty bits, you have a substantial increase in hardware requirements for every single user. There’s no way that you’re going to get enough out of each incremental user from ad revenue to offset the infrastructure costs.
Now, even if we could do it, do you want it done? Absolutely not. Once the technology for inspecting every TCP payload exists, the Feds could be monitoring everything everyone does on line in real time, every day, all day.
The best way to keep kiddies from viewing porn on the ‘net is for their parents to re-discover a razor strop and learn how to use it on Little Johnnie.