The idea of Net Neutrality has been getting lots more attention lately. I'm just wondering how you feel about it.

Incase you don't know what Net Neutrality is, here is a great link to a small video that explains it all very well: http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/307

I voted that its possibly the worst thing to ever happen to the internet, as it violates our personal rights.

Net neutrality is negative in my opinion. Many companies can exploit it to their advantage, which in the end would end up harming the users (duh!).

If that happens, I think that we here at DaniWeb would be obligated to build our own provider which is totally neutral. Will you be ready to answer when you hear the call?

In a free market, the market will speak.

If ISPs are liable for damages or prosecution if their users have access to certain sites (and they are, especially when it comes to sites promoting or enabling criminal activity) I see nothing wrong with ISPs having the option to deny their users access to those sites.

That's the flipside of the coin. Everyone is always speaking about the "evil companies" restricting their customers, but those customers make it so that such becomes inevitable if the company isn't to break the law.

An ISP is a business, not a U.S. Government agency, so the 1st Ammendment (freedom of... expression) doesn't apply. If an ISP blocks a website's ability to express itself to you, that is completely THEIR right, and doesn't violate anyone else's consitutional rights.

So, I'm not clear what "personal rights" you're referring to in your post.

An analogy might help: you have every right to eat hamburgers. However, a restaurant is not therefore obligated to have hamburgers on their menu. The can choose what they serve, and that violates no one's rights.

But shouldn't certain things be regulated by the government? Thats what this is all about. I think this should be regulated by the government. If we don't do something now, this can really get out of hand later.

Government regulations are, in principle, in the interest of public safety. Thus, in my analogy, there are government regulations about the quality of meat, meat inspection, etc.

An ISP is a business, and if they choose the questionable business practice of taking a financial interest in say, a search engine, and then deny or degrade access to competing search engines, then I simply choose a different ISP.

That's how a free-market economy works.

In fact, I WANT my ISP to block certain sites. Whenever I get a phishing email, I report it to:

1) The company they are spoofing (Paypal, Ebay)
2) The registrar for the domain hosting the spoof site
3) MY ISP, in the hopes that they'll blacklist that site to protect their customers.

So, I'm compelled to choice number 1 in your poll. I'm not sure that your poll choices are very clear... is number 3 meant to be a vote FOR or AGAINST a U.S. law enforcing Net Neutrality?

Now, in the case of locations where there may be only one ISP, then I would perhaps feel differently.

Reading the excellent Wiki on the topic, I was struck by the irony of this quote: ""allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success." by Tim Wu.

What's ironic is that Google, through the Adwords/Adsense technology and their hyping of the SEO industry, has dramatically altered "what people see and do online", and in my opinion, this has indeed fundamentally undermined Internet principles. Yet, Tim Wu is Google's Vice-President.

http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread44691.html

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No, everything that you let the government regulate is a reduction of your freedom.

What if the government doesn't want you to see websites critical to itself, they could (if you let the government regulate what ISPs can pass to their customers) just tell ISPs to block those sites.

Think that's farfetched? Just look at China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba.
Or supposedly democratic countries like France which also have such restrictions (though to a lesser degree).

No, let the free market handle it. If people don't want their internet access blocked by their ISP they'll switch to another one.
Heck, I did that once already. That ISP no longer exists...
When Yahoo tried to steal the content users had put on their free hosting service (by suddenly changing the TOS to read that everything you uploaded there became the property of Yahoo) over a third of their subscribers cleaned out their accounts and left in under a week. A week later that policy change was reversed.

That's a very interesting analogy. I really hadn't thought of it that way quite yet. I suppose in that aspect, you are correct. Perhaps then, the movement needs to move towards the creation of a government body to help regulate some of these practises? Airlines, electricity, phone/early telecom and those sorts of things where government regulated for a period of time. Granted, there where mistakes made in all of those cases, but in the interest of mitigating this likely circumstance, might it not be worth giving a try?

That said, if we where to create some sort of government oversight- I would be infavor of having the politicians take a back seat to this and setting it up "grass-roots" style so that things don't become overly convoluted.

Yeah, that'll happen....