Malware Control vs Net Neutrality
One of the major issues facing Internet Access in the US and other countries right now is Net Neutrality. With access to the Information Superhighway being controlled by a limited number of service providers, the concern is always that they have the ability to censor the Internet by refusing to connect you to websites they deem unfriendly to their business. We've seen another form of this kind of activity years ago when live TV footage of New Year's Eve celebrations in Times Square were digitally edited by one major network to superimpose ads of the network's partners on top of ads of partners of competing networks, so it's not much of a stretch that Internet Service Providers would be tempted to do the same with more serious implications since the Internet is taking over how people get their information away from not only TV, but print sources as well.
However ISP's do have a vested interest in limiting access that has nothing to do with censoring legitimate communication and that special case is malware. Although the industry has now matured enough beyond the "I LOVE YOU" virus days to be able to better respond to such viruses, the fact of the matter is that it still is and will continue to be a reactive industry since what future viruses look like are inherently unpredictable and while standard practices by end users help curtailing the spread of malware, the social engineering aspect of hacking continues to fool people into, say, opening an infected e-mail link that hijacks their computers and forwards that link to everyone in their e-mail inboxes.
ISP and other online service providers have stepped up and implemented their solutions that block infected content or redact problematic portions of content, but a standardized method of preventing malware spread, should these solutions fail, still needs to be adopted. As much as we cherish the openness of the Internet, we need to establish a framework that explicitly lays out the conditions for censoring communications on the grounds of malware prevention and not competitive business or political gain.
Fears that this might turn into something Orwellian are legitimate, but only when end users continue to remain engaged in these Net Neutrality discussion would those fears fail to materialize.