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...
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.
Obviously not, which is why I described it as “in an ideal world”.
It’s like you’re saying “supermarkets can’t carry umbrellas, those aren’t food products!” and supermarkets start carrying umbrellas, people are happy and you remain steadfast in your denial that that’s a possible thing that could be good.
The internet carries everything, and you’re the one who’s mad about that. You want some of it to disappear from your experience - as dictated by the company whose entire job is connecting you to the whole-ass internet - and to reconcile the inherent contradiction, you invent an infinite variety of providers, available to everyone everywhere, implicitly with no material difference in cost or performance.
The answer is no.
That’s not how markets work.
Any practical approximation is a nightmare of conflicting incentives that would immediately collapse. Again. Because similar rubber-room fake-internet companies used to exist, and have tried popping up again, and it’s not oligopoly that kills them. It’s the impossibility of pleasing all the people all the time.
Just install Net Nanny and promote network neutrality. God damn.
And some people want their ISPs not to carry some things. For example, maybe they think their grocery stores shouldn’t carry hard-core pornography.
Wouldn’t it be better if people who wanted no filters could choose that option, and people who didn’t could choose a filtered option?