MPAA to FCC

Found on Ars Technica on Wednesday, 18 July 2007
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The MPAA is concerned that network neutrality rules might bring an end to such beloved technologies as digital watermarking, deep packet inspection, acoustic fingerprinting, and content filtering of all kinds.

The MPAA's concern is not with winning any sort of broad ideological ground in the debate over how the Internet should work, but to make sure that ISPs can "manage their networks to protect intellectual property in order to best serve the interests of content creators and the content-consuming public."

Going beyond the specific technologies listed above, the MPAA believes that ISPs need to have the right to control traffic shaping, quality of service guarantees, latency, and bandwidth hogging—all of special concern when it comes to regulating P2P traffic.

ISP's should not be allowed to meddle with the data running through the lines. They provide the access, nothing more, nothing less. When they advertise their service as unlimited it means I can make unlimited use of it. Bandwith shaping, filtering and similar activities clearly decrease the service I've paid for. If an ISP want to block P2P or free SMTP connections, it should say so; and not just in vague words in the fineprint on page 324 of the TOS. Then the customer can decide if he's ok with that or if he prefers to sign up with another, better ISP.