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[FYI] (Fwd) FC: Panama requires ISPs to block Internet telephony




------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Mon, 04 Nov 2002 23:01:35 -0500
To:             	politech@politechbot.com
From:           	Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject:        	FC: Panama requires ISPs to block Internet telephony
Send reply to:  	declan@well.com

[Forwarded with grateful acknowledgement from Dave Farber's IP list.
--Declan]

---

From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger@ibd.com>
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 13:21:39 -0800
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>, Dave Farber IP
<dave@farber.net>
Subject: Panama begins blocking IP ports to prevent VoIP

http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=277

  Panama begins blocking IP ports (updated)
Date: Sunday, November 03 @ 21:36:03 EST
Topic: News

In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to
Internet telephony, the government of Panama has decreed that 24 UDP
ports be blocked by all Internet service providers.

The ports include ones that are commonly used for voice over IP as
well as some that are used for other purposes, apparently with the
idea that these, too, could be used to circumvent the POTS (plain old
telephone system, a term of art) in making telephone calls.

In the decree
(http://www.ersp.gob.pa/busqueda/show_resol.asp?id=JD-3576&idsector=1)
, the Panamanian government requires "that within 5 days of
publication, all ISPs will block the 24 UDP ports used for VoIP and
any other that could be used in the future (which could end up being
all UDP ports)," according to a reporter and computer consultant
there, and that "the ISPs will block in their firewall or main router
and in all their Border routers that connect with other autonomous
systems."

This "unequivocally decrees that all routers, including those not
carrying traffic from Panama, but that might be traversing Panama,
have the 24 UDP ports blocked."

The significance of the government action affects areas far beyond
that nation. Due to its geographical location, numerous undersea
cables connect in the country, making it a substantial hub for
international IP traffic.

Among the services that are to be disrupted are NetMeeting, Dialpad,
and Net2phone, which labels itself "communication without borders," a
claim which apparently will no longer be true if one of those borders
is Panamanian or communication is between two countries whose IP
traffic passes through Panama.

The decree is apparently rooted in complaints by Cable & Wireless
Panama (Motto: "If you're worried about your data, voice, or Internet
service provider, we're here to help"), which says it is losing money
due to users employing the Internet to make otherwise expensive
internetional telephone calls -- calls that would otherwise be listed
on Cable & Wireless bills.

The UDP ports involved include: 1034, 1035, 2090, 2091, 5000, 6801,
6802, 6803, 9900, 9901, 12080, 12120, 12122, 22555, 26133, 30582,
35061, 38000, 38100, 38200, 47563, 48310, 51200, and 51201.

The decree was published October 25.

Among the services that employ some of those ports are "nlockmgr," the
NFS lock manager responsible for rpc.statd and rpc.lockd, which in
turn are responsible for crash recovery functions for locked files and
for processing file locking requests, respectively; telnet; and
numerous VoIP services.

In addition to those who wish to save on their phone bills, the
government order blocks the perfectly lawful use of those ports by
businesses that have legitimate VoIP applications allowed in the
country.

There were reports late Sunday that Panamanian ISPs were planning a
demonstration aimed at exhibiting their displeasure with the
government action.

Update: A call has been issued for proxies that can be used for VoIP,
preferably more important, less-easily blocked ports. Anyone with
knowledge of this may contact us here and we'll see that your message
gets through.




-- 
US Citizens:  Vote for Regime Change in the United States on Tuesday
Nov 5

Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
15550 Wildcat Ridge Saratoga, CA 95070
408-882-4755 Fax: 408-490-2868 rberger@ibd.com http://www.ibd.com

---

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 17:45:51 -0500

Subject: Re: <[IP]> Panama begins blocking IP ports to prevent VoIP

The Panama "UDP Port block" is interesting from a technical point of
view.

Routers are not supposed to inspect anything outside the IP header in
making their routing decisions.   That's what the Internet standard
says.

If some device looks at the UDP data (which technically means the
first few bytes of the data in an IP datagram that has a particular
protocol number), it is not a router.   It is something that is
sometimes called a "middlebox".

What Panama is doing is asking for the Internet to be redesigned and
rearchitected in order to inflict a policy that relates to
competition.  The result is not the Internet.

It is important for the IAB and IETF to point out to the government of
Panama that the service they are asking to be deployed is NOT the
Internet.   It violates the Internet standards, by incorporating an
end-to-end protocol into the routers between adminstrative domains.

This is not trivial.  The Internet architecture is designed so that
the IP transport layer does not need to know, and cannot know, the
meaning of the bits contained in the data portion of the datagrams.





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