Quote:Technological improvements in infrastructure provide much MUCH higher bandwidth throughput today than ever before. There isn't a reason for them to throttle, but because of their monopoly there is always the option to charge premiums for certain sites and the consumer can't do anything about it. Again though, it hasn't happened yet.

 

It makes me wonder. If you encrypt your traffic using a VPN, how can your ISP ever know you are using a streaming service? How can they charge premiums for specific services or sites if all your traffic destination is undecipherable? Of course, certain ISPs have/can totally block VPN/openSSL traffic so that is a risk too.

 

Regarding your first statement, that's basically how I'm looking at it.  To give an analogy, look at what recently happened to I believe DirecTV customers (it might have been Comcast, I'm too lazy to look it up) recently.  The local FOX/CBS affiliate was having to renegotiate a contract for the provider to continue service.  The consumer ended up without access to those networks only through the provider.  The same could possibly start happening between online companies that deliver content ONLY over the internet (Netflix) and the ISP's.

 

Regarding your second point.  I don't see them (the ISP's) specifically blocking VPN/OpenSSL since it's used for so many applications related to business among other things.  But I can see them blocking protocols such as torrent.  Again though, what would be the point other than to limit the quantity of data downloaded rather than the actual content?

 

As I said, I don't understand the whole "net neutrality" thing fully.

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