By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 08/29/05

How much control can - or should - communications transport providers exert over the content they carry?

Some background: Back in the pre-Revolutionary United States, transport and content providers were one and the same. The folks who wrote newspapers also ran the mail services - which meant that they'd never bother to deliver the competition's newspapers. One of the benefits of establishing and regulating the U.S. Postal Service was creating a legal framework prohibiting carriers from interfering in content.