Disclaimer: I'm a former StrongDM employee
63 karma · joined April 8, 2016
Disclaimer: I'm a former StrongDM employee
I am not discussing the presence of fast lanes right now, which have their own problems. I'm talking about the literal prevention of accessing specific data because your ISP decides you aren't allowed to access it.
Without net neutrality, if my ISP sees I'm trying to access a political site that they don't like, they could just make half of all those requests fail. If they like a particular political candidate for office in my area, then they can prevent me from accessing all the other candidate's sites or reading a news story about a positive thing the other candidate did.
This is absolutely enabling censorship and yes we are discussing different examples but I do not need to demonstrate how your example is censorship when another example (that you said was a possibility!) does, if I am trying to demonstrate how this enables censorship. This is not a case of (All things prevented by net neutrality) but (There exists a thing prevented by net neutrality) that enables censorship.
> 1) Throttling sites the ISP doesn't like
Is the definition of censorship. ISPs could just choose to not let anybody access their competitors' websites, for example.
You're correct that data caps don't fall under this, however.
Your single ISP available to you could decide that you don't get to access your favorite site(s) without charging an additional fee to access them. They could refuse to offer any unknown sites, and just offer facebook, youtube, etc, each costing some number of dollars to use.
Net neutrality prevents this.
1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...
Net neutrality is currently enforced because ISPs are regulated as "common carriers", meaning they can't intentionally prefer some traffic over other traffic. The vote on Thursday is to reverse this regulation.
If ISPs could prefer some traffic over others, they could do any of the things that you suggest, enabling censorship.
I agree the second case is a little silly.