[RTW] dearly love packet inspection

[Harald Alvestrand]

On 01/06/11 20:18, Henry Sinnreich wrote:
>> Okay "direct flows of non-RTP application data" goes beyond scope creep;
>> to satisfy this completely, we are talking an end-point-to-end-point tunnel,
>> which will run afoul of a lot of folks who dearly love packet inspection.
> Why should the IETF and W3C abide by the folks who love deep packet
> inspection? I would like to see some IESG guidance here, since it is
> contrary to Internet and to the Web. Break of privacy, etc.
>
> To accelerate clarity here, what does Harald and people on the list think?
My personal opinion:

At the workshop, several use cases were identified where stuff that is 
not audio or video needed to be communicated from one browser to another 
quickly enough that relaying via backend web server(s) is problematic - 
the canonical poster child is the movement of bullets in a first-person 
shooter game, but there are other cases; I think Lisa mentioned that in 
Second Life, the placement of audio sources in the stereo field needs to 
be communicated reasonably synchronously with the sound itself.

I am hesitant to rule point-to-point traffic that isn't audio or video 
out of scope, given the discussion at the workshop; certainly, given the 
RAVEN RFC (RFC 2804), I do not want to rule it out of scope because it's 
hard to write packet inspection state machines that can tell what's 
going on here.

                        Harald