Should the Government Regulate Net Neutrality?

Misinformed

The truth of the matter is that it is an issue of urgency. Not necessarily immediate earth-shattering urgency but of an urgency that preemptive action would save many headaches in the future when means and methods of 'Traffic Shaping' or 'Throttling' become commonplace and accepted. If governments of the world do not mandate network neutality you can expect many more actions like those that Comcast has done in limiting peoples network traffic.

I would not necessarily call Comcast's interferance 'Minor'. Their method of interference was out and out FORGERY of of RST packets to force both ends to drop the connection, a bonafide Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack by an agent who is tasked with the delivery of packets from point A to point B. If trust between us, the ISPs and the backbone providers breaks down then the internet as it stands becomes a much more hostile place to do business. How can we not trust the providers along the way not to perform MITM attacks when its convenient for them. Can we trust these ISPs not to poison DNS entries so that we cannot reach their compeditor's sites (if there are even compeditors). And Comcast has not actually stopped their traffic shaping/throttling practices but have instead tried to sidestep or do an end run around the Network Neutrality debate by applying their traffic shaping/throttling measures to ALL high bandwidth uses such as streaming audio and video which services like the popular Youtube deliver.

I also fail to see how a SMS shortcode has anything to do with the Internet. Cellular Phones that receive SMS messages tend to be a wireless telecommunications issue and NOT an Internet issue.

The thing is that in the US you have typically 1 or 2 broadband providers in any given area. A monopoly or duopoly does not provide the necessary amount of choice that a customer would be empowered to effect change on these big corporations. In fact it is more likely than not less beneficial for the customer because the ones that should be competing can easily enact backroom deals to perform similar methods on their own networks then anyone in that geograhical area has no option but to goto a company that is utilizing traffic shaping/throttling. It would be diffcult or impossible to prove but everyone knows these sorts of actions happen like with the price of gas it is almost impossible to prove but everyone can see its effects.

If you want other evidence of network neutrality being broken or abused it might be hard to find them in the US presently but all you need to do is look north of the border to Rogers Communications Inc. who instead of trying to throttle bittorrent or find out traffic patterns and what not has decided to enact a draconian throttling solution that chokes your speed when it detects ANY encrypted sessions (VPN Tunnels which businesses rely on for Telecommuting employees, Some versions of Bittorrent, TOR, sites that have judicious use of HTTPS). From my personal experience speeds will drop from 500kb/s down to maybe 20kb/s if you are lucky, a decrease in bandwidth of approximately 96%. I have no idea what Bell Canada's is like but both Rogers AND Bell Canada (the cable and DSL duopoly north of the border in most cases) have forced these traffic shaping/throttling measures down to 3rd party ISPs that are supposed to be competing with them.

I am not saying all traffic shaping is necessarily bad. The thing is that GOOD traffic shaping is generally not noticed by the users of the network and will generally improve the experience for everyone involved. Prioritizing protocols where latency is a serious impact on performance such as VOIP and some gaming applications where latency or 'lag' really degrades the performance will vastly improve performance of those protocols. Giving web pages and email protocols the next rung of priority where interactivity is present (human at the keyboard/screen) but where latency is not a serious factor and where a bit of transmission speed/bandwidth helps out will make it so that the internet doesnt seem slow for your typical mom and pop user. I can also understand putting streaming video a step below that since once the downloads are started all it does need is a little bit of bandwidth to keep a decent buffer and that Bittorrent would be the lowest priority since quite often there is not a person at the keyboard. In general people dont care as long as Bittorrent works and gets things sent/received with little to no interference.