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It's a simple tactic. Get people thinking you are in charge of the Internet by "protecting it". Once people take it as an unwritten rule that you are the police of the Internet, you can do whatever you want.

Canada doesn't give two shits about what the FCC has to say about net neutrality.

The CRTC has been actively working against the entire idea of net neutrality, and the very few providers that don't have to answer to the CRTC perform lovely things like AD insertion/replacement and falsifying DNS, not to mention throttling competitor's VoIP service (but, of course, not their own).

Canada has the sort of internet you find in the 3rd world. The only difference being not the price, nor the bandwidth (the price and average available bandwidth is in-line with most 3rd internet world pricing) but rather the caps on the service (most 3rd world countries have somewhat smaller caps).

Way to go, Canada!

If "Net Neutrality"= "treat traffic the same regardless of protocol", then BAD.

Not in my opinion. I see no reason at all to have policies based on protocol. That's a static decision, and static policy decisions can be inaccurate for any particular connection, out of date or simply ignorant of new protocols, and can/will be largely decided by politics not practicality. I.e. bittorent bad, equally bandwidth heavy streaming protocols from ISP-approved media sites good.

You can get QoS while remaining protocol agnostic. You simply base the priority for any connection based on the amount of bandwidth it uses. Lower bandwidth, higher priority. Low-bandwidth latency-sensitive apps like VOIP work perfectly without having their protocol recognized, bulk data transfers are deprioritized but still get plenty of bandwidth (because the higher priority connections are by definition not using much) again without the protocol mattering. If you try to game the system by sending bulk data transfers though VOIP protocols, then you still get downgraded, while a static system would fail.

The only cases it doesn't work for are cases where there's not much you can do anyway -- like live (as in no buffering) streaming video.

What I don't know is if there is any routers out there that do this, or if it's still considered too much memory to keep the connection state info around for packets that are just passing through.

If "Net Neutrality"= "treat traffic the same regardless of source and destination", then GOOD.

If "Net Neutrality"= "treat traffic the same regardless of protocol", then BAD.

The FCC's Network Neutrality Principles [fcc.gov] are:

1. Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
2. Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
3. Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network;
4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

Neither of the principles you state are, as such, strictly necessary to meet those principles.

That being said, discrimination by source or destination could in some cases violated the principles (e.g., if an ISP that is also a content provider outright blocks access to traffic trying to reach competing content providers over its network, or blocks all port 80 requests, or all requessts that appear to use the HTTP protocol, going to their non-business subscribers IPs.) Likewise, discrimination by protocol might in some cases violate the protocol (indeed, the last example of discrimination by source or destination is also a discrimination by protocol.) Whether deprioritizing rather than outright blocking traffic using certain ports or protocols would violate the principles depends on the circumstances; presumably, deprioritization that made it impractical to use the protocol for its principal purpose would be problematic.

The problem is, ISP's are already doing it based on protocol, and it's bad. If your internet service is provided by a cable company, they just may slow down video protocols as perceived competition on their own bandwidth, but allow voice ones through to take a stab at phone companies.

On the other hand, if you have a DSL through a phone provider, they just may slow down voice/audio protocols for the same reasons, but allow video ones through to take a stab at cable companies.

There was a LOT of competitions, back biting, and attempts at legislation between both of these types of companies a few years back, I remember TONS of commercials with each side trying to get the people on board. Both sides pretty much supported the concept of government intervention to keep the other out of their business while allowing their side to get into the others. I'm generally against most government intervention.

In most cases, a competitor will spring up when one type of industry is screwing the people at large that doesn't screw the people at large, at least at first. Unfortunately in communications industries those competitors are few and far between.

I would LOVE to start my own cable company that simply pushed analog and QAM TV without the need for converter boxes and was utterly lacking in all but absolutely require encryption. I think the public would love to use their own TV tuners again and be able to build their MythTV boxes/use their Tivos without having to clear it with some mystical gate keeper.

On one hand, you have a future where you can never be sure what's really "out there", where there are huge swaths of information that you simply can't access, not because you or the information owner have any disagreement, but because some third party that you don't even know has determined that you shouldn't or couldn't see it.

I've always maintained that the opposite of net neutrality is censorship. Simply put, net neutrality and the establishment of ISPs as carriers of information rather than producers, filters, or surveyors will be every single bit as important to freedom in western civilization as free speech.

And before someone goes Mr. Pedantic on me, note that "censorship" is literally defined as the act or ability to censor. Other entities besides the government can censor information and ISPs would be the perfect example.

I would generally agree, but would point out two things:

1) if you intend to run servers etc, a business package may well be more for you, since the ISP probably won't restrict that so much - you get what you pay for, and if you pay for a generic consumer package that's what you'll get
2) It helps to block mail server ports for most people to stop people unwittingly becoming part of a spam botnet. The benefits of the blocking more than outweigh the downsides of a few geeks being inconvenienced.