That is not net neutrality.
Sure it is. There's competition, semi-regular speed upgrades, if I don't like my ISP I can take my business elsewhere. As a result, I'm currently on an entirely unlimited plan with no throttling, and no angry letter if I download more than some hidden limit. My understanding is that a significant amount, if not the majority of the US is unable to do that.
> the government thinks they can force-regulate things like a "porn filter" and content filters
They could do that in the USA already, monopoly regulation or no monopoly regulation. Monopoly regulation is practically entirely separate from content regulation.
In any case, they only regulate that the porn filter and content filters must be an option - I've certainly never had such a thing on my connection. The only sites that are blocked for me are blocked under court order. This is practically equivalent to regulating that ISPs must provide a free copy of Net Nanny to all customers to use if they so choose, it's just done on their end rather than mine. (Also, hilariously, there isn't actually any regulation on this - ISPs are currently doing it willingly.)
I think you are thinking of the state of US mobile industry and it's data plans. I'm not aware of any large ISP that has throttles or bandwidth caps (comcast has a supposed 300GB cap but has never to this day enforced it).
> In any case, they only regulate that the porn filter and content filters must be an option
You're forgetting that it's by default on, and that one must call their ISP and "opt-in" to seeing porn. Social stigma aside, how can you realistically and with 100% accuracy block only true porn websites? You cannot, and the UK has shown that over and over as legitimate websites get blocked, including news websites that run stories that relate to porn, etc. The same is true if the filters were expanded to say download websites. And who's to say a website is illegal or not - I for one certainly don't want my government telling me some download sites are legal and others are not.
Not to mention who's to say I intend to break the law simply by visiting a website? Maybe I'm doing research (Brian Krebs), etc.
The very notion of filtering some content goes completely against what net neutrality means.
Really? I've heard countless stories of US ISPs doing deep packet inspection to throttle torrents and other peer-to-peer traffic. If they've stopped that, my googling suggests it's primarily due to FCC regulation.
> You're forgetting that it's by default on, and that one must call their ISP and "opt-in" to seeing porn.
Ah, incorrect. All major ISPs (a) ask during sign-up, and (b) provide a web-based tool for turning it off. There's no need to ever talk to anybody.
> Social stigma aside, how can you realistically and with 100% accuracy block only true porn websites?
You can't, but there's already products on the market which claim to provide content filters which block porn. Net Nanny is a personal one, a good many companies implement one.
> And who's to say a website is illegal or not - I for one certainly don't want my government telling me some download sites are legal and others are not.
Your Government actually decides that more websites are illegal than any other country, delisting them from the .com DNS space for everybody, whether in the US or not. Perhaps you should fix that before worrying about an optional content filter that nobody in the US is currently talking about creating.
> Not to mention who's to say I intend to break the law simply by visiting a website?
Nobody. It's an optional content filter.
Then you haven't been paying attention[1]. I live in one of these areas, and have already been getting 1-2 robocalls a day this month about my data usage. They're calling it a "trial", but the costs are very real, and it's all in place to go national when people here don't complain enough. If I go over in the next two months, I will start getting hit with that charge.
[1] https://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-...
As was pointed out in an earlier thread (I think to you, but perhaps I'm misremembering) it's reasonable for the President to include a qualifier like 'legal content' in order to avoid headlines like 'Obama supports child porn?!' in the sensationalist media.
Furthermore, just because a website's activities are illegal does not mean I intend to break the law simply by visiting them. If that were the case, Brian Krebs would be in prison by now.
What we don't need is mandated filters by the government like they have over across the pond. Opt-out but defaulted to opted-in - and impossible filters that catch up a lot of legitimate websites and content which then have to file some sort of petition to be unblocked, meanwhile costing them all traffic and a lot of business (look it up, news websites have been taken down numerous times by the UK "porn filter" because they ran a story relating to porn and the entire site was blocked).