QoS and the potential of censorship

I had an email question from a reader asking if QoS opens the door for censorship. I’m not an expert on QoS, but it does seem unlikely that it would be implemented that way, but it's a valid question.

If QoS rules were implemented badly, it could give big telco and cable companies the right to slow down bits or block web pages from a source they don’t like (for political reasons, hence censorship or bias in the media pipes, or more likely say a Hulu or YouTube or Netflix if it competed with their cable and VOD offerings and revenue --and if such company didn’t pay ‘protection money’). But I would note that you could have some forms of QoS where there was no censorship per se, it would just favor those with lots of cash to buy “fast lane” access. I think most rational proponents of QoS would not admit they favor the right of ISPs to just ‘block’ material they disagree with, outright block it. I doubt that would fly.

Now blocking BitTorrent or other P2P, if they accused those services of being almost all piracy and theft, that is more possible. Net Neutrality never was supposed to protect anything but ‘lawful’ traffic. So it’s a grey area, where IP and copyright rights are at tension with ‘privacy’ rights. But you do have to have some small empathy for the companies spending billions to upgrade networks that get eaten up by illegally downloaded movies.

Anyway, censorship bad, yes.