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...
“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.
“People want a soup sandwich, therefore, it must be so. Can I not put anything I desire between bread? Quad era shut up.”
Shoo.
You don’t want ISPs to do anything else, therefore they are forbidden from being able to do anything else, because it goes against your wishes. (But somehow you want people to believe that it’s a natural law, not just your desires).
Their central purpose is fundamentally at odds with the functionality you want, to such an extent that it is impossible for the market you hand-wave to exist. Your ideal is so far from reality that it’s harmful to pursue.
Just rent pipe and filter it yourself. God damn.
Their central purpose is to deliver to the customer the data the customer wants, part of that can also be to not deliver to the customer the data the customer doesn’t want. Why are you so unwilling to accept this?