There’s three problems here: that the Internet is supposed to be traffic-neutral, by design; that Comcast, even if they disagreed with that assertion, and even if the FCC shouldn’t have asked for it as a condition of the NBC-Comcast merger, did agree to ensure that any traffic on their network would be treated equally.

Let me try to help you with this, since it’s apparent that you just don’t understand – no one’s saying piracy or things like it should be legal. They’re saying that ISPs should NOT discriminate what traffic goes across their tubes.

Put it this way: is it OK when China or Pakistan or Iran takes steps to censor content on the Internet when accessed from within their countries? Would it be OK for a private company to do so?

And I yielded back name-calling before because I felt you might be interested in debate, not schoolyard taunts.

I could sit here and debate how much you know about technology (obviously not that much) but it wouldn’t matter in the end. The problem, which you obviously missed, is that Comcast has made it clear that their video service has greater priority on their network and does NOT count towards their ridiculous network usage caps. Netflix called foul on this, because it essentially means that their service is being degraded in favor of one provider’s own video service.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. They’ve been doing this to VoIP services like Vonage for years – specifically redirecting traffic from those services which operate competing services in order to upsell their own services.

You know what ISP doesn’t do stuff like this? Verizon FiOS, because they actually spend money giving their customers as much bandwidth as possible and improving their network conditions, to the point where it’s kind of hard to find complaints about network speeds and conditions. Comcast and other ISPs had around 6 MBPS downstream network speeds until FiOS came stomping in and blew them away with speeds like 10-15 MBPS, and current standard speeds of 25 MBPS symmetric (with speeds around 50-75 available for an extra cost and 100 MBPS coming later).

Comcast overextended themselves by buying up every local cable company from here to kingdom come without a solid plan to bring all of these companies and their customers up to snuff in terms of network conditions. What do they do instead? Impose ridiculous caps, increase prices annually, traffic-shape their network and take money that could’ve fixed all of these problems and buy NBC.

Now, do I have any problem with private companies doing whatever they want with their resources? Nope. I don’t want the government imposing Net Neutrality as codified law; I want companies to willingly adhere to the concept without handing the government another way or reason to get involved in the affairs of the private sector – frankly, the FCC ought to be disbanded, as it just doesn’t matter any more, but that’s a pipe dream.

Just because someone disagrees with you, doesn’t make them a progressive dupe. You hurt yourself and our cause with that kind of liberal gut-reaction.

I’m not being duped; nor have you even once bothered to try to respond to what I’ve been saying.

Or… maybe you’re just not capable of understanding what I’m saying…

I never said I was a “Net Neutie”, nor would I mess with anyone’s freedom of choice. I just think Comcast is a really bad choice and needs a major management shakeup in order to compete (and shake loose a lot of smaller companies they gobbled up).

And another reminder:

“Be respectful, or be banned. No Profanity.”