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...
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?
You know how you avoid your ISP giving you data you don’t want?
Don’t fucking request it.
Nobody’s shoving webpages into your browser. The ISP’s job is to go where you want, and deliver things you asked for.
Expecting that service to spy on you, in exactly the way you want, and prevent you from doing the things you don’t want to do, is confused. And even if for some goddamn reason that was a thing anyone offered, you would never get exactly what you’re looking for. The market forces involved are not compatible with that goal.
There will never be one million subtly distinct internets for you to choose from. That is an absurd fantasy, beyond sensible consideration. Yet here we are, because you can’t accept that. It’s not a monopoly problem - lively competition won’t shatter the market into philosophically-aligned variations on trading packets with distant computers. And fixing monopoly doesn’t mean all choices are equal! Can you not imagine someone being forced to choose between low speed, or censorship? Like if the only dozen options for gigabit fiber all block something, and you’re stuck choosing which things you don’t get? Gigabit upload, but no pornography. Wireless downloads, except politics. All to stop you from going to a website… you don’t want to go to? Instead of just - not fuckin’ going there?
This nonsense ends here. If you want your internet access filtered - pay a VPN, or edit your hosts file, or download some Christian nanny software. Stop expecting the phone company to listen to every call and hang up when you say a word they don’t like.
Sounds like someone has never heard of something called “spam”.
Not the same as filtering porn and you goddamn well know it.
Who’s talking about filtering porn?