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Richard makes a very good observation: "In general, arguments that service providers can't do this or that as a practical matter are founded on sand. Advances in technology make many things practical tomorrow that are utterly impossible today, and we can more or less expect that to happen." The entertainment industry, for example, has been demanding that ISP "filter" content to prevent what they assert is unauthorized content transfer. The technology now exists to do this and we have now seen entertainment industry demand that the ISPs protect their interests. We even have the entertainment industry pushing for legislation to require ISPs to act as their private law enforcement arm. From the free-market perspective, the ISP have no obligation to filter content to protect the interests of the entertainment industry. The following quote from John Perry Barlow highlights this process at work ""The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent.".
Furthermore, I think the simplest reason why they wouldn't censor opinions they may disagree with is that it would get them negative publicity. More people are likely to leave them over that than come to them.
Besides, ISPs that employ content filtering to the detriment of their subscribers will only push people toward competing providers that don't filter.
Great comment, to which I would add just a couple of points.
First, to the extent that a corporation that may provide the "pipes" is separate from one that provides the content, there would be no incentive to filter. When the economic incentives are tied together, some strange things begin to happen. For example, NBC provided very little coverage of the Chernobyl accident, and it was no accident that NBC was then owned by General Electric, maker of nuclear power plants. So the incentive can exist, and when coupled with the fact that in many communities there is only one available high speed internet provider, the opportunity and the motive both exist.
Second, there have in fact been many examples of suppression of free speech by large corporations, in particular AT&T, so there is evidence that when motive and opportunity both exist, abuses, do, in fact occur.
Third, there is a reason why the FIRST amendment came FIRST. Because the freedom of speech was considered a paramount freedom. But to those at TLF it appears not to be very important, and any suppression of the right to express is seen as a trifling concern. Many of the comments defending Tim's position center around the line of thinking that maybe some abuses will occur but they won't be that bad and the market will eventually sort out this issue. But this forgets the very important point that free speech delayed is free speech denied. If, for example important information can't be distributed before an election the damage to society is done, and it is TOO LATE to turn back the clock.
The First Amendment is important; don't abandon it.
What Adam's post is addressing, I believe, is the question of whether ISPs will ever be able to detect and suppress speech. Net neutrality advocates get people worked up by claiming that new laws are needed to prevent ISP censorship, but the fact is that such censorship is basically impossible. There is no valid basis for arguing that ISPs will ever be able to distinguish between a pro-abortion data transmission from an anti-abortion one. The days of communicating in plain-text are numbered, and ISPs surely realize that if they can't even successfully fingerprint pirated videos, it's a waste of time and money to attempt to stifle unwanted speech.
Here's a thought for free speech advocates: invent a really cool technique for suppressing free speech and patent it. Don't license the patent, and you're golden, democracy rules. All hail the patent system!
Then there is the ye olde intimidation tactic: Movie Studios Sue Australian ISP For Not Waving Magic Wand And Defeating Piracy
For the really conspiratorial people like me, what happens if the RIAA starts to pay the ISPs a bounty for each pirate caught? Would ISPs filter for a profit?
The studios and the RIAA are entitled to protect their legal rights, that's not really in dispute.
Or to use another analogy, you should not be able to force a third party who just happens to be standing on the street corner to "protect" your property. If the content industry can somehow coerce the "third" party ISP to "protect" their so-called property rights, the concept of net neutrality will be a sham.
Furthermore, if it is OK to inspect packets for the benefit of one special interest group for acts that may considered illegal, it doesn't take much of an imagination to see it expanded to other acts considered illegal in order to "save the children". It's a slippery slope.
And if it did, all it would take is a small act of Congress to nullify these objections.
Digital fingerprinting becomes next to useless when full payload encryption is applied to the data. It doesn't make it impossible to figure out the protocol (that's what end-to-end tunneling is for) but encryption makes legal P2P traffic indistinguishable from illegal P2P traffic. Pirates have plenty of methods of trading infringing files without using easily identifiable protocols like Bittorrent. The same goes for pretty much any content that an ISP might have an interest in filtering.
There will always be methods of so completely hiding a file that nobody can detect it, and some of these will never be addressed. But that's OK, the search for perfection isn't essential.
(later) Indeed it does, with a few formatting weirdnesses is all.