A less immediate but no less real threat

One of the safeguards against internet censorship has been the "common carrier" rule, where as long as a carrier (a phone company, an ISP, a website operator, an internet connection vendor) exercised no control over the content of the information flowing through it they were immune to real or potential misuse.

The original use was to protect the phone company from lawsuits for allowing, say, a kidnapper to use a telephone to deliver a ransom message. It's been used more recently to defend ISPs against laws requiring them to screen out erotic or pornographic content. Another instance might be Blogger.com who could argue that since they don't screen people who want to create blogs they're not responsible for content that could be construed as illegal (or even just immoral or unconventional.)

Well, there's a bit of a move afoot by service providers to charge extra to certain web services in exchange for speeding up performance for those sites. For instance for a (not so small) fee AT&T might make Yahoo! pages come up faster than Google's when you surf via their DSL lines.

Yes, there are all sorts of moral, practical, consumer-choice, and ethical issues we could raise over that.

I'm just thinking that with that kind of tailored processing in place it would be a very, very small jump to regulators saying "well, if you can do that then you can also block any web traffic. You want us to approve your scheme you have comply with ours."

Just saying.

Here's a link to the Washington Post TechNews article on the topic that's been knocking around for a day or two: The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet.