A Little More Insight

After reading the comments by David Farber, I had a question that I wanted some extra insight on. I reached out to a professor at The University of Arizona. I asked Professor Hsinchun Chen, "When dealing with Net Neutrality some against it raises the question of if the Internet was regulated by the service providers it would decrease the numbers of viruses and spyware and malicious acts due to the fact that they as in the providers would be able to block the user from gaining access to any harmful content. Is that true? Can they get rid of viruses and things of those nature if the ISPs were allowed to block certain applications?" His response was as follows:

I don’t think viruses and such vices are technical problems in nature. The problem lies in jurisdictional boundary, international laws, and security ecosystem. International law enforcement agencies (e.g., Interpol) are not sophisticated enough. Most security-related companies (e.g., Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec) do not have incentives to address these vices which may hurt their profits. ISP filtering would be ad hoc since not all will have the same level of sophistication as the security firms.

This makes a lot of sense. Why bite the hands that feed you. Norton and McAfee really don't have incentives to address the vices because if those are gone they won't have a company anymore.