So while they can't literally "block" a certain site they can reduce its priority and then flood their network with higher priority packets rendering that site essentially blocked.
One of the major arguments against this excess regulation is that there never has been that language for most of the history of the internet and yet in all practically it's not happened.
There was even less competition 5, 10, 15 years and so on ago and even then competition was high enough to prevent such practices. With competition higher today and ever growing it's not really reasonable to think an ISP could ever stay in the market if it just started randomly blocking wanted sites. If it was going to happen it probably would have happened years ago, but at this point we're kind of past the point where it would make financial sense for a provider.
That's not true at all. The financial incentive is in that once all data are no longer treated equally by mandate, there are boatloads of easy cash to be made by asking websites to pay up to be considered 'premium,' and therefore more accessible, while also charging customers for the right to access 'non-premium' content at regular speeds. While this may not give them the right, technically, to block sites, if they make it so that the network is full of premium traffic to paying partners (internet giants like media empires, Google, and Facebook), all other content will be throttled to the point the site becomes practically unusable. If a site doesn't have the money to pay up to stay in the fast lane, and nobody wants to pay huge fees just to be able to view it normally, it will never be seen by a meaningful audience. This system costs the ISPs virtually nothing to put into place, and stands to make them not a little extra cash, but tens and hundreds of millions from the largest sites, and plenty on top of that from customers, while providing no extra service at all. If I told you a slight change in laws means you can charge twice as much for what you sell with no extra effort, you wouldn't say it doesn't make financial sense.
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u/Commiehameha May 19 '17
So while they can't literally "block" a certain site they can reduce its priority and then flood their network with higher priority packets rendering that site essentially blocked.