[Rainer.]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey

Face it, people. It's not "Net Neutrality" if you're forcing private businesses to adhere to your personal standards. When you do that, you're nationalizing the Internet. Go ahead!

I was under the impression that Net Neutrality is in favor of having web access disregard all personal standards...

[redbaron]

With the slant that you'll be fined if someone claims that your practices are harming their exposure/etc.

It really goes along with how poorly radio was doing back when the fairness doctrine was the status-quo. This type of "fairness" regulation has never been anything but a disaster when it's been tried in every other medium & format... but I'm sure it'll work with the internet, which has been just fine on its own for the last two decades.

AOL tried to force people into its own content, and look how well they're doing today. People won't tolerate it, and they vote with their wallet. I think it's a huge waste of time that does nothing but grant a ton of control to a bunch of braindead legislators who don't understand what the internet is or how it works in the first place.

[Ax]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey

It's not fair that Wal-Mart doesn't carry Qurans or Jewish devotional materials! I can't even get most of their Christian stuff in Spanish! There ought to be a law.

And we need a law on the books that says all major book chains, who benefit from having our roads to ship their goods on and our currency to spend, have to carry controversial works such as the Quran, The Satanic Verses, Madonna's Sex, issues of Playboy, The Anarchist's Cookbook, Mein Kampf, the latest published screeds by neo-Nazis, black separatists, and end times prophets. Imagine if people without Internet access weren't able to buy these books because the store owners felt that it didn't fit their image, level of controversy comfort, or mission. Unfair.

And why do I have to buy Pepsi products at Taco Bell? Pepsi has had a lot more sexuality in their ads over the years. I should be able to buy Coke at Taco Bell! By law, they should have all competitors there.

And why do banks only advertise their products and services in each branch? I should be made aware of what their competitors offer! There should be a wall in each bank dedicated to showing all the latest offers from their competitors.

And you know what! I'm sick of TV news offering its slant. FOX News covered the Tea Party more sympathetically than MSNBC, who covered Occupy Wall Street more sympathetically than FOX News. That's absurd, they should be forced to have the same content.

And can you believe that certain private schools don't have kids read books with the same level of adult content as public schools? It's like privately-run educational institutions shaping kids can simply block anything they don't like, be it political, religious, whatever!

And newspapers don't devote enough spaces to their critics. They're controlling what we see! They should be required to devote a full page to their detractors each issue -- and to advertise the rates and content of other papers.




Face it, people. It's not "Net Neutrality" if you're forcing private businesses to adhere to your personal standards. When you do that, you're nationalizing the Internet. Go ahead!

I mean, what's the fear? That these ISP's might block controversial sites such as Wikileaks? Oh yeah, if the US government ran it, they'd NEVER do that!

Net neutrality isn't about some random set of rules, it's keeping the internet open. The better comparison would be a restaurant saying "I don't want black people in my restaurant, so, lets ban them."

So, some guy makes a website, the ISP sees it, says, "I don't like this", and thus they block it from their customers. That's different than them deciding not to sell something, that's enabling them to completely kill this website's business. It's not that they've decided not to sell a product or to sell on over the other, they're preventing somebody else from selling a product.

Same concept, what if I didn't like some business and I constructed a large divider and propped it up on the side of the road so people couldn't see it. Now I've effectively killed that business.

Net Neutrality is about keeping the net open.

[thesteve]

Originally Posted by Ax

Net neutrality isn't about some random set of rules, it's keeping the internet open. The better comparison would be a restaurant saying "I don't want black people in my restaurant, so, lets ban them."

So, some guy makes a website, the ISP sees it, says, "I don't like this", and thus they block it from their customers. That's different than them deciding not to sell something, that's enabling them to completely kill this website's business. It's not that they've decided not to sell a product or to sell on over the other, they're preventing somebody else from selling a product.

Same concept, what if I didn't like some business and I constructed a large divider and propped it up on the side of the road so people couldn't see it. Now I've effectively killed that business.

Net Neutrality is about keeping the net open.

This all starts with the idea that the internet is something that the public should have access to. This is something the FCC has put rules in place to regulate.

However, picking and choosing media outlets is something that the major ISPs already do with their TV outlets. It's why every couple of years you hear about Cox/Time Warner/AT&T being caught in an access battle with ESPN/FOX/Viacom over $0.50 per channel per user.

That being said, I'm not in favor of ISPs having the ability to pick and choose what I have access to when I sign onto the internet.