Would you pay a quarter to check your work e-mail from home? Would your office pay a quarter to make sure you could? Broadband providers want that quarter and have essentially stated they'll alter and degrade the network more and more until they get it. But why do they deserve that quarter? They're not the only providers involved with getting a packet from home to work; they're just the branch with the least competition. This is a logistical thing -- only a couple of broadband providers can physically serve each region. In this regard, they're like airports. You might have dozens of airlines, but only a few runways for them to land on.

Imagine for a moment that salespeople had to give a chunk of their commissions to the airports they flew out of, and you'd have an idea of why the Internet community is horrified by Internet isolationism.

It gets worse. According to Metcalfe's Law, the value of a network increases substantially with the number of other people you can connect to. On isolated networks, your connectivity is reduced, and therefore the value of your link plummets. But the real Internet is still out there; there's just a "fog bank" placed in front of it by your broadband provider. Therefore, the first thing you have to do when connecting to the Internet is to escape your broadband provider and get to network-neutral territory. This involves setting up a session, possibly one that's encrypted, and making your way out to a node that will give you genuine access to the Internet.

Citizens of countries outside the U.S. are quite familiar with the need to find "proxies" with greater freedom than their state providers are willing to allow. Imagine if Americans needed to live under the same restrictions!

Consider the proxy problem from the broadband provider side, though. You want to create an isolated network, where nonpayment of access fees by a receiver leads to suppressed access for a telecommuting employee. You have to thus suppress any mechanism by which traffic can escape your network that has not gone through the correct toll check. As a security engineer, I am nervous that this effort will make it increasingly difficult for businesses and organizations to deploy secure systems. If the underlying network actively discourages encrypted communication, communication will simply not be encrypted -- to the delight of identity thieves everywhere.