> It's my impression that the price of internet access is at > least somewhat proportional to local cost of living. Typically as is the cost of food, housing,

> It's my impression that the price of internet access is at > least somewhat proportional to local cost of living. Typically as is the cost of food, housing, wages, etc. > And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based > discounts. Is it really the job of the ISP to account for such things? Not that I agree with this, but: Surely it would make more sense to balance income at the point of it arriving in your account, not when you go to spend it? I don't think we want private companies to become political or biased in any way, I think this should be the soul responsibility of accountable politicians, rather than unaccountable corporate entities. > it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their > underage children > HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can > manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe > search" settings. > So why not let users set that up at the ISP level? Firstly I believe people should have the ability to choose what filters they impose on themselves, such filters should never be on by default. I can fully understand and respect the cases for wanting such filtering, but it can also be extremely dangerous. Secondly I believe in most cases that such filters do already exist - you can request such things from your ISP, purchase routers that filter such traffic, install software onto devices that perform blocking, etc. The options exist and are actively used. One real example I remember was a parent installing a simple filter on their family computer (for their child). It would filter websites and key-words/phrases from websites, such as "sex". It so happened there was an incident reported by a local news website with something like "Local Child Sex Offender Still Not Caught", which of course was filtered to "Local Offender Still Not Caught". Their child was out playing in this quite high risk area and the parents were completely unaware of the risks. The point is, that when acting in what we believe to be in the best interest of ourselves and others, we can actually cause more damage than good.