AT&T made waves yesterday when it blocked all traffic to img.4chan.org (not linkified for a good reason), effectively shutting down the /b/ and /r9k/ image boards. At first, it was thought this was arbitrary censorship because of the risqué (and sometimes downright disturbing) content of the boards. Messages were flamed, the AT&T CEO was declared dead, Anonymous had a field party, and...

Well, fecal matter being bananas or not, it was a huge misunderstanding in the end, as moot (4chan's founder) explains.

So, why the whole mess? Why couldn't people have assumed that AT&T had a good reason for doing what they did in the first place? Well, for one, the most reaction was from "/b/tards" who couldn't access their beloved every-defect-of-the-human-race-uncensored image board. But then why did I get mad? (If anyone calls me a /b/tard i will personally hurt them.)

Net neutrality. For those who don't know what it is, it's not about being neutral about the 'net, it's about keeping the 'net neutral and fair - as it is now. Still unclear? Examples talk best.

Internet service provider A decides to instate a tiered system for routing internet traffic. The lowest tier is sluggish, for those unable or unwilling to pay for the higher tiers, where speed is higher, bandwidth is larger, etc. Company X, that hosts an online service based on streaming on a lot of info fast to the user (e.g. YouTube) has to face the choice between losing users who use ISP A, or pay A to buy one of the higher tiers.

Meanwhile, this means that small personal sites are throttled, and users of A (and users from other ISPs whose traffic passes thru A's routers) will get even more "up to <insert speed here>" ripoff deals.

If A is given the freedom to do this, which is effectively selective free(er) speech (for a price), what stops them from enforcing selective censorship of material they consider unfit? A competitor's ads?

What if Google decided to stop routing requests to Microsoft Live Search (aka bing, or crap), or Yahoo Search (not a terrible idea, but horribly unfair and unethical)? Or our beloved pr0n? Or 4chan?

Ceiling Cat would be out of a job!

The Internet reacted to the latter. I'm happy to see that there is some awareness out there of this problem, but many are unaware of this threat to our current dynamic, free and open internet. A commitment to net neutrality is a commitment to the web's future innovations. And 4chan memes.