scott wrote:
> I never said they could, my argument is that an ISP shouldn't be forced 
> by law to provide access to the entire internet or nothing at all.  It 
> should be able to decide what it wants to provide.

Why? What benefit would that provide? Why is it good for anyone other than 
the owners of ISPs to be able to charge extra to let you access movie 
reviews or your hotmail account?

> likely to me that the "active filtering" could also be used to block 
> torrents, BBC iPlayer, YouTube, or other high-bandwidth content (this 
> would make more financial sense for the ISPs).

Blocking for technical reasons is one thing. Blocking because you can then 
charge more money to deliver content someone else has created that's popular 
is something else.

> I suspect the ISPs really want to change their eg $10/month plan into 
> two separate plans.  Where plan A is $5/month without access to (eg) any 
> streaming video or torrents, and then a plan B that is $20/month and has 
> access to everything. 

No. What they're talking about is allowing access to everything except 
things like ESPN sports, then charging extra for that. ESPN pushes this, 
because then they can refuse to deliver to the customers of ISPs where that 
ISP hasn't paid ESPN extra.  It's basically a form of "e-commerce" 
implemented as a heirarchy of groups charging people.

It's nothing to do with bandwidth.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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