I’d go further, on the topic of Google being an editor: that’s like calling a flower sifter an editor. Both are machines made by people that provide a filtering function.

Richard: Many of us who support (some flavor of) network neutrality do indeed care a great deal about the cases you mention. We just don’t make category errors and compare them to net neutrality. State (mis)use of data has nothing to do with packet prioritization.

There are many ways to restrict free speech, and priority-based routing is only one of them. In fact, it’s about the weakest way to restrict free speech that’s conceivable, especially if we’re talking about sub-second delays, which is what all forms of network prioritizing do. And it’s more theoretical than real in any case.

The kind of discrimination that’s possible to do in a search engine is much more powerful, and as we’ve seen in case of Google’s and Yahoo!s suck-up to the communist Chinese government, much more effective. So Yoo is right that Google’s and Yahoo!s friends in the pro-regulation movement focus on a small and theoretical evil while the much greater evil that Google commits every day goes unchecked.

There are people doing prison time on China today thanks to Google and Yahoo! and the net neutrality advocates couldn’t care less.

The role of an editor is to make the content of a magazine or webpage usable to the consumer, the role of the “editor” as used in the citation is that of a traffic cop to monitor and filter the flow of information (without the user’s knowledge and to prevent the user from circumventing any restrictions).

As used in the citation, the so-called “editor” would: 1. Have a unilateral authority to determine what you may send and receive. 2. Implicit in this so-called right, the “editor” would have the authority to read what you are sending and receiving. 3. The “editor” can impose virtually any value judgment they wish to determine what is or is not acceptable content. 4. If the “editor” does not like your content they would be able to unilaterally impose a “fine” on you. 5. Because the “editor” determines on his/her own volition what is or is not acceptable for transmission, the consumer has virtually no due process rights. 6. In short, the “editor” is the judge, jury, and executioner in a society of by and for the corporations.