The word “Network Neutrality” has always been so vague that it could mean any desirable thing people wanted it to be.  The inverse of “Network Neutrality” or a “non-neutral network” could mean any undesirable thing people wanted it to mean.  If people of a certain political leanings could be whipped into a frenzy when told that FoxNews.com might load faster than DailyKos under a non-neutral network, that myth was and will continue to be propagated.  Never mind that websites have never loaded at the same speed on the Internet, facts aren’t important to fear mongers.

Now the fear mongers are pulling out the other boogie-man which is the supposed death of privacy.  The privacy scare completely ignores the facts about Deep Packet Inspection but it’s a valuable fear mongering tool since it can scare people from both political parties.  All it takes to get mainstream news coverage is to find someone to say scary things about things they know nothing about and it can be cited as fact.

Elijah Saxon of the anti-globalization group Riseup claims that network routing infrastructure that could monitor and deliver packets at contracted speeds can also violate our email and web browsing privacy.  But anyone with a passable level of networking technology would tell you that this claim is laughable.  Routers work on the packet layer and generally don’t even look at the content and they don’t have the compute power to do really deep inspection in real-time (less than a millisecond).

Note: There are a few exceptions where a Network Address Translation (NAT) router might look at some of the protocol headers and port communications data to ensure that applications like FTP work correctly, but NAT is generally not employed on wired Internet services.  Even on the wireless services that do employ NAT (since there aren’t enough IP addresses to go around), the mechanism is about as dumb as a metal detector and it looks for a particular sequence of data to ascertain the information it needs to make FTP function correctly.

There were some companies (now defunct) that were proposing to partner with ISPs to implement “behavioral advertising”.  They would do this by attaching additional monitoring devices to the side of the network that would monitor a replica of the data passing through routers in less than real-time.  The outcry was so loud that anyone who attempted in the United States backed down immediately.  Verizon and AT&T (two of the larges ISPs in the US) for example have even pledged not to deploy any kind of behavioral advertising unless there was explicit customer opt-in, and neither companies have plans to deploy such a system.

The only place on the Internet that user data is being monitored and stored for future data mining are the major cloud services like Google Gmail.  But in that case, they’re offering a valuable service at no up front fee to the consumer in exchange for access to their data for advertising purposes.  The consumer opts in though it’s doubtful that most consumers ever read the contract they click yes to sign onto the service.

This notion that a non-neutral Internet (whatever that means) would violate require implementing devices that would violate privacy on an Internet application level is pure nonsense and it’s a fear based solely on ignorance and manipulation.  The Internet never has been “neutral” in the sense that all players are equal in outcome.  The free market has determined that consumers don’t want broadband services that monitor them for advertising or any other reason not involving normal network management security and bookkeeping.  Consumers might be willing to trade their privacy for opt-in discounts but ad-supported broadband haven’t taken off yet.  If it ever does take off, it shouldn’t pose any privacy threat so long as it is done on a voluntary and consensual basis.