Originally Posted by partial excerpt from ARS article

And to help further stress the importance of net neutrality, here are a few scenarios, each perfectly plausible or already happening, that might be possible if ISPs give up on the attempt to be neutral Internet providers:

Perhaps you'll one day have to pay your Internet overlords for Ars—or your second-favorite website—content to render quickly. (Or perhaps the sites themselves will need to pay.) Pay up or the site will remain slow. A slow-rendering Ars might push our readers to competing sites that have either ponied up for fast-lane service or didn't need to pay because they were granted free fast-lane access (often called "zero rating") as part of some business deal.

Perhaps YouTube and Vimeo will count against your data cap—while an ISP's own "preferred" video service won't. (This sort of thing is already common on mobile connections.)

Perhaps your ISP, under pressure from various industries, simply begins blocking various websites—say, a file-sharing website that some people use for piracy but which you use to share multitrack mixes with your band. Is that a decision you want an ISP to be making?

Perhaps you'll have trouble watching your favorite video service. Maybe not because your ISP has "blocked" it, but because your ISP limits streaming video bandwidth within its network... which might just happen to benefit its legacy cable TV or IPTV system. (Netflix is so big and has so much leverage that this is not a major worry for the company—but what about the next Netflix?

Perhaps your ISP will throttle the high-bandwidth BitTorrent file-sharing protocol—or whatever replaces it. (Remember the Comcast BitTorrent debacle that resulted in Comcast paying $16 million?) Or maybe your ISP will just charge you extra to use it.

Perhaps you'll be bombarded with javascript-injected advertisements overlaid onto Web pages—ads put there by the ISPs. ISPs are already doing this, to some extent, with Internet service doled out for free at coffee houses and airports. And some small ISPs have tried it with home Internet service.

Originally Posted by sanlyn (Post 50161)

Don't ever reply to unsolicited requests for your personal information. I'd strongly suggest that you run an antivirus scan to get rid of that malware. Try the free Malwarebytes download.