Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

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> if not the majority of the US is unable to do that.

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.

> I'm not aware of any large ISP that has throttles or bandwidth caps

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.

>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).

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-...

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