On ISPs Not Filtering Viruses

[plambert at sprintmail.com]

At 1:46 PM -0800 1/7/02, John Gilmore wrote:
>I thought ISPs were supposed to be bit-pipes.  End-to-end unrestricted
>connectivity is the basic feature of the Internet.  This feature is
>what made the Internet superior to every preceding network.  If my ISP
>was filtering my mail or my packets, I'd complain.

Bit pipes yes ... but some ISPs are trying to add "value added 
services".  The average home user has trouble running firewalls and 
virus checking sofware and would likely pay to have someone else 
handle these services at the ISP.

The reason it is not commonly available is that firewalls and 
particularly virus filtering requires lots of computing resources. 
This translates into a need for a whole new class of network device 
that provides "network edge services". For example:
http://www.cosinecom.com/library/b_ipsdp.html

I suspect that we will see in the next few years a proliferation of 
add on services to our base internet connectivity.  This will be akin 
to paying for caller id or call forwarding on our phone services.  If 
you don't need it, you won't subscribe, users that do need these 
services will have the option to buy them from their ISP.

Now having hardware in ISPs that have the ability to scan all traffic 
at full Gigabit data rates could be abused in the future ... but 
that's a different thread of discussion.

Paul





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