Thomas Jefferson Wouldn’t Think Much of Modern Journalism. Blogging – That’s Another Story…
When I hear people mention Net Neutrality, I wonder exactly what they mean. I’ve heard several definitions, and I know I have a different idea of it.
I think of Net Neutrality as not blocking any form of transmission. In other words, an ISP, (Comcast comes to mind), may not block bittorent.
They might need to shape the traffic as a temporary measure during periods of high bandwidth usage, but they won’t stop it. This would also cover VOIP traffic or multimedia traffic or any protocol out there.
Now some think of Net Neutrality as preventing ISP’s from charging content sites, (Google comes to mind), so that their users can reach them. This was brought up a while back when some CEO commented that high traffic sites should also pay other ISP’s for “Priority access” to their customers.
This second option was brought up by an ignorant CEO who was frustrated at how much growth was going on and how he didn’t want to actually pay to upgrade his company’s network.
This type of thinking is usually associated with a CEO who has no idea what is going on and is more concerned with his stock options then actually growing the business.
If a company actually blocked google from their network because they wouldn’t pay danegeld, I suspect they would begin losing clients rapidly.
I think all we need is a simple law or rule that is based on the common carrier notion. As long as you don’t block anything, you can’t be held liable for what passes through your network. The moment you do, you lose this immunity and can be taken to court by people who have been damaged by your decisions.
Just my thoughts on the subject. 
