Four years ago, Jisc responded to the Board of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) consultation on network neutrality to point out that some security measures cannot just be temporary responses by the victims of attacks, but need to be permanently configured in all networks to prevent them being used for distributed denial of service and other attacks. This applies, in particular, to blocking of spoofed addresses, as recommended by BCP-38.

A new EU law, created earlier this year, requires public network providers to ensure "network neutrality" – roughly, that every packet be treated alike unless there are legitimate reasons not to.

The Domain Name Service (DNS) which translates names to IP addresses (among many other things) is critical for humans using the Internet. Research by Slavko Gajin and Petar Bojovic presented at the TERENA Networking Conference indicates that mis-configurations are more common than we might hope. Getting DNS right often requires different organisations to have matching configurations: if my name server says that part of the name space is delegated to your name server then your name server needs to agree!