Should we consider the US internet to be ‘neutral’ now? As one of the commenters over at /. wrote: “Why is it that if Comcast decided to block Skype, people would be up in arms, but a cell phone provider blocking the same service is considered legitimate?”

But in my mind it goes a lot further than that! I count seven parties that can limit your access on any given day. Sometimes it’s 1) the State (eg Iran), or 2) the provider (Google voluntarily limits its service in China), or it’s 3) the backbone network (they charge for traffic, I heard Google was paying $1m/day for YouTube traffic), or it could be 4) the ISP (who can throttle bandwidth, deny access to protocols such as Skype above, and even modify content), sometimes it’s 5) the local network (such as the office that denies workers access to ‘timewasters’ like Twitter and Gmail), or it could be 6) a parent (blocking access to ‘unsafe’ sites such as MySpace) and finally 7) the device manufacturer (eg Apple denying the Google Voice app).

To make matters worse, the infringement doesn’t even have to happen in real time. Most offices will keep logs of internet traffic for use in a wrongful termination suit, and ISPs and the State governments keep similar logs as a deterrent to illegal activities online.

I’m curious to know which of these ‘providers’ will be targeted by new legislation. I think we can safely rule out #1 and #6!