Entrusting our speech to multiple different corporate actors is always risky. Yet given how most of the internet is currently structured, our online expression largely depends on a set of private companies ranging from our direct Internet service providers and platforms, to upstream ISPs (sometimes...
Yes, but I shouldn’t have to if I don’t want to. In an ideal world I could choose from a list of ISPs, one of them maybe blocks nothing, another blocks anything that might offend a muslim, another blocks porn, etc.
Are you saying that the company I contract with to provide my Internet service never should? Why not? If there’s fair competition I can choose from the list of companies that blocks what I want and lets through what I don’t want. The only problem now is that there isn’t any competition.
Again, not the ISP’s job. If you want those filters… the ISP is not where they go.
The thing you’re describing only works in an impossible flawless market, with infinite choice and infinite time. In practice there’s always some bullshit forced on everyone because enough people want it… or enough people will tolerate it. You’d get stuck choosing between the ISP that has porn but censors criticism of religion, or the ISP with free speech except praise for Israel, or the ISP that does everything you want except also blocks Google.
The service is fundamentally incompatible with the variety of choice required to cover something as fuzzy and individual as “stuff I don’t like.” So it’s not their fucking job. You pay that company to physically connect you to the internet, and if you want that data filtered, go right ahead. The physical-layer packet-delivery company is not responsible for what you do with the packets. You wanna run that shit by your minister or whatever? They cannot stop you.
Why not?
See rest of comment.
What the fuck.
“rest of comment” is nonsense about how it’s not possible for an ISP to do that job, but that’s clearly nonsense. It’s like saying that a supermarket can’t choose what goes on their shelves because someone might not be satisfied, so a supermarket must carry every item known to mankind.
… rest of comment explains why it’s not desirable for ISPs to be the ones doing that job. What you want will never be what happens. That degree of choice and control is not what those markets do.
The supermarket analogy is genuinely illustrative of your confusion. You want AOL. You want a service that’s like the internet, but silo’d and filtered, with someone else choosing what people get to see. You imagine that’s fine and dandy so long as you get to choose which silo controls your experience. But that’s fundamentally the opposite of how the internet works. That’s why Compuserve and Prodigy died.
Tech analogies are worse than useless. An ISP’s role is to connect you to the in-ter-net, the actual network, so that other machines can send stuff to your machine. They don’t control what any machine has or does. If you don’t want websites from some weird-ass server… don’t go there. If you can’t trust yourself not to do that… put in a filter. There’s already third-party filters available, right the hell now. They have the drop-in variety you expect from the company that rents pipe. Why in the name of god would you want those two things combined, as if conflating them would make the awful marketplace better?
The only things ISPs should be competing on are bandwidth and latency. That is the product they sell. Anything else is a trick being played on you.
In your personal opinion, which doesn’t make it impossible or even undesirable.
I don’t, but I definitely know people who would indeed want a service like that. But, you say they’re not allowed to want that because it’s not possible for their ISP to provide that because it’s all or nothing with ISPs.
In objective fact.
As explained in the comment you dismissed as rambling, after being prodded to address it, at all.
These services don’t do this thing. That’s not what they’re for. These are opposite goals, and the side effects are predictably awful. Even if the market did magically work out to be the utopia of choice that only exists in libertarian fantasy.
I am explicitly telling you they can get it, right the hell now. It is immediately available.
But not from the ISP.
Because that’s not their fucking job.
According to your definition of what they do and what they’re for. But, surely, you agree it’s possible.
So, if it’s possible, the question is whether it’s desirable. If you can prove that nobody would ever want something that you agree people wanted in the past (something like AOL) then you can prove your point. If you think that you can prove that nobody today would ever want something like AOL… go for it.