I'm happy for an ISP to be allowed to carry out as much censorship as it wants, provided it makes that known. They definitely shouldn't be forced to, though — in the general case — and I don't think anyone's demonstrated that they have been so in this case.
> I'm happy for an ISP to be allowed to carry out as much censorship as it wants, provided it makes that known.
Knowing about it won't help you if every ISP option you have is doing the same thing.
Where I live, we have laws that prevent people from interfering with the mail. If I send a letter to someone, once it's accepted the mail carriers can't generally withhold it and make demands before they deliver it or open my letter and remove or change whatever words/pages they feel like before completing delivery.
I think the internet should be treated the same. Beyond some basic QOS ISPs should be dumb pipes and be mostly forbidden from messing with things you send/receive over the connection.
I think there's a reasonable need for an ISP to act as a censor, if that's what its customers require. Hopefully, enough people want a censorship-free experience that every provider becoming a censor is unlikely to happen.
If your mail service had a "make sure mail from known pornographers doesn't get delivered to my house" option, and you had kids at home, you might well opt for it.
If someone wants to block certain sites there are client-based solutions that people can set up themselves and proxies they can use if they really want to depend on someone else to decide what they should be allowed to see. There's no need for it at the ISP level. At the very least it should be opt in, but something you have to ask to have removed.
