re: #37 Okami

I say, if ISP’s want to police what people can and can’t do with their internet, let them. But if they want to control what their customers can do, then they’ll have to take responsibility for any illegal activities performed using their service. It’s the same reason telephone companies don’t get in trouble when people use phonelines to illegally transmit information, because they don’t control what people do with phone connections.

It doesn’t have anything to do with policing, or with people using their internet connection for doing illegal things. This isn’t about law enforcement at all. Net neutrality doesn’t touch copyright issues or hacking at all. That is a completely separate and distinct issue.

Net Neutrality is a policy agenda that basically says “Internet access is a utility. You can sell me access capped at a certain speed, or in chunks of so much data per dollar, but you may not prioritize those bits, or block bits from certain services.”

Net neutrality is the idea that ISP’s are utilities that provide a pipe of a given width, and should not be allowed to discriminate as to what users are allowed to push or pull through that pipe. (To use a metaphor)