The Internet: Bite down on something hard, users, this one's gonna hurt.

[Zalatix]

You know how the courts will rule on this one, at least if it goes to the Supreme Court.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13510_3-57470566-21/verizon-wireless-wants-to-edit-your-internet-access/?tag=postrtcol;FD.posts

Verizon Wireless wants to 'edit' your Internet access

Here's a novel idea: Claim the First Amendment gives a carrier the right to pick and choose what you connect to via the Internet.

What if your wireless provider gave you Internet access and search results according to what it decided was a "priority"?

As a Verizon Wireless customer, I'm furious at the idea that it would "pick favorites" over what I was actually looking for -- especially if it was an emergency.

But that's just what Verizon is fighting in court to do right now. Verizon has filed a brief (Verizon vs. FCC) with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for the "freedom" to edit your Internet, dear customer.

If you think this would remain a Verizon issue, think again. If Verizon gatecrashes Internet access filtering, you better bet that other ISPs will hustle to get on the train to sell Internet "priority" spots to the highest bidders.

[flamingdem]

1. When their employees strike again

you can be sure that will be edited and fast.

[Downwinder]

2. If Verizon is going to establish and maintain editorial rights

over content then they should also assume responsibility for the veracity of that content.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Like Fox news does?

[Occulus]

7. It occurs to me that this argument appears to destroy their safe harbor under the DMCA.

If Verizon gets its way on this, and my interpretation is in fact correct, internet users will be able to kill Verizon by pirating content. I would vigorously encourage such action against them if that is in fact the case.

[Zalatix]

8. Yeah, but corporations have this uncanny way of having their cake and eating it, too.

[Trillo]

4. This reminds me of the editing that's done to school textbooks. NT

[hunter]

5. Why not go all the way like the Chinese internet companies...

... by blocking content the government doesn't approve of, severely throttling content from outside their systems, and inserting advertising in pages that don't belong to them.

Crap like this is why we need net neutrality.

Big American corporations wish the USA was a capitalist paradise like China, where the people are well conditioned to accept all manner of abuse from their corrupt government and wealthy corporations.

[randome]

6. I don't see how they could control search engines.

But they clearly want the right to throttle up or down users they deem to be data hogs. That's bullshit on its own. The Internet should forever remain public domain and a public service with equal rights to access for all.

[Posteritatis]

10. Shadier ISPs hijack browsing traffic quite a bit already

It's usually in the form of taking over 404 pages or sending people who typo a domain to the ISP's search portal (who uses search portals? I mean, seriously?). Most of them want to do considerably more than that.

Controlling search engines in that sense would consist of hijacking the search returns and inserting the results they wanted near the top.

[randome]

11. Forgot about that.

Wasn't that something Microsoft/Bing was doing not long ago?

[Posteritatis]

12. Maybe if they were doing some weirdness in IE, but that wouldn't fly that well just yet

They're still being watched closely for IE shenanigans in the past, though I wouldn't put it past them.

The stuff I'm describing would have to be done at the level of the individual ISP, though. Microsoft doesn't have the ability to hijack traffic between my ISP and my computer, especially at the level of detail I'm talking about (or the simpler stuff I described seeing in my other post).

[MoreGOPoop]

9. Has anyone else been having strange

occurrences with Hotmail's filter? Email from several sites that I had long ago established as "Safe" have recently begun showing up in my "Junk" folder as "Suspicious". When I found mail from Bernie, Reproductive Rights and Sunlight Foundation in there, I had a damn cow. And, there is no option to mark as safe.