Quote:
Originally Posted by Barnes
The second logical step after this would be the government forcing ISPs to not allow certain things across their network. This would essentially make them content publishers and allow them to not only block types of traffic but traffic to specific locations. Bye Bye net neutrality.
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This is territory I hope the government never decides to venture into. Once you start trolling the seas with big nets you're going to catch a lot of fish that you weren't after. I can understanding wanting to filter out material that's illegal (say kiddie porn and even illegal downloading), but what else is going to get filtered out along with that?
If this does become the norm then we end up with two Internets. One controlled by the corporations and governments, like the Great FireWall of China (or the Golden Shield as I like to refer to it), and one unregulated run mostly by servers in less developed nations that have more pressing problems to deal with than what its citizens do on the net (as an aside, this all seems like a plot for a sci-fi flick where the Internet is policed and anyone connecting to the illegal internet is tracked down and punished).
By no means am I saying C61 is going to lead to that, but I agree with your point that once governments and corporations started seeing the internet as a threat, we start heading into dangerous territory. If the industry was more focused on the massive distribution potential of the Internet rather than a gateway to piracy we could avoid all this mess and end up with a better end product for consumers. Piracy will always be there, as it was before the net ever existed, but if the record industry viewed it as competiton and applied all their marketing efforts down than avenue as they would to any legitmate threat, this probably all could have been avoided in the first place.