

Ask HN: Will the net-neutrality be looking to throttle illegal downloading? - vonklaus

It occurred to me, probably a lot later than it should, that this will be a nuclear weapon against freedom of speech and illegal file-sharing. Is this possible?
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dragonwriter
Net neutrality is nearly, but not entirely, orthogonal to efforts to control
_unlawful_ internet activity; its about neutrality among _lawful_ uses.

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dobbsbob
It's more about ISPs acting like cable companies where you are forced to pay
for different service tiers. If you want to watch youtube or netflix you have
to pay extra otherwise they will throttle your connection to those sites. A
lot of ISPs where I am (not in US) already throttle default torrent ports for
most of the popular clients like utorrent/bitTorrent so p2p file-sharing is
already a target.

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vonklaus
I'm not a fan of south park (a popular comedy show in the US) but the creators
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are pretty smart guys. They will never censor
content for anyone. If they do, it will lead to a slippery slope where others
will demand the same privilege. If we give up even an inch on this then pages
and files will become so latent they won't even be worth accessing.

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wmf
No. If anything, I would expect net neutrality to benefit pirates.

