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...
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?
You.
You are hallucinating a utopia of censorship, where the roads only go where you want to drive, and nobody sends you a letter without permission, and it magically works that way for everybody.
What the fuck do you think people would want censored? How do you not understand porn is on the list of options? It’s one of the things some ISPs have censored, and all the things ISPs censor have become problems forced upon users, no matter how many other nosy-ass bandwidth-hoses they can choose from.
No, I’m suggesting a world where customers can choose. No blocking, blocking some offensive content, blocking different offensive content, the customer chooses the ISP that matches what they want.
Other than using grandiose language, you can’t seem to come up with an actual argument why that’s a bad thing.
That world is a fantasy. It’s not the one we live in, and it won’t happen.
ISPs are the wrong level at which to expect that kind of control. See abundant prior explanations. Looking straight at an argument and going “nuh-uh” doesn’t mean there was no argument. Stop lying to me about my own comments.