I sent a letter to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in response to their campaign for net neutrality:
Hi,
As an independent observer, I'm delighted that you do a great job about informing people of what ISPs and big companies come up with in order to get more money. However, I have a few comments about the reasons for which you want to stop this:
I think you should implement and fight for another kind of solution: developing a crowd-sourced ISP monitoring browser plugin, for example, and aggregating and publishing the extent to which ISPs discriminate their traffic. This way, consumers are aware and able to make a conscious decision, and the market will find a balance which will please the people the most.
- If ISP companies wish to grant special privileges to certain players, I think they should have the freedom to do so - because they own their routers and infrastructure, and should be able to do whatever they please with them. Legislating for net neutrality is an attack on their freedom.
- Perhaps allowing this type of contracts will make it cheaper for typical consumers to use mass/high-traffic sites (like the ones provided by those who can pay for privileges).
However, a fundamentally more important problem in the US (as I see it), is the over-regulation of telecom, leading to few alternatives and only a handful of ISPs holding monopoly (just like the tobacco industry). You should work to reduce regulation, to enable more players to enter the market more easily, instead of increasing it (for example by giving them an extra form to fill - the net neutrality one).
