When we moved here, I was very clear that I wasn’t going to use Comcast for Internet access. (I use DirecTV for television because it’s the only place to get NFL Sunday ticket and thus watch my Giants games.)

I don’t want to give my business to a company that thinks it has the right to monitor what I do online and slow down my connection if it doesn’t like the content I’m getting. That’s exactly what Comcast does. If you use Bittorrent to get files, good luck; Comcast throttles it.

The logic is that Bittorrent is used by people illegally sharing music and movies. But it’s also used for downloading large files. For example, video-game demos, which can run into the hundreds of megabytes. Ditto for versions of Linux. And other stuff, all of which I’ve downloaded via Bittorrent.

Bittorrent lets content providers ’spread the pain’ of sending enormous files to people. Everyone who downloads is also uploading, so no one person (or company) has to supply all the bandwidth. It’s by far the most efficient way to download a big game.

But because it can be used illegally, Comcast thinks it has the right to slow down users’ Bittorrent connections without telling them. It then denied it was doing such a thing, but the Associated Press — and others — went and proved it was.

The company is now facing lawsuits over this, as it should. Can you imagine if every Internet access company decided to monitor traffic and decide what it would allow and what it wouldn’t? Immediately you’d have every right-wing nut group demanding that ISPs cut off nudity, information on religions other than Christianity, information about birth control — you name it. In fact, every interest group in the world would demand that information not meeting its agenda be stifled.

Wonderful.

Verizon understands this at least. The New York Times writes that AT&T is developing software to scan what its Internet users are doing and attempt to identify and block pirated content. (This is the same AT&T that let the feds tap its users’ phone calls without a court order.)

Forget the problems with identifying what’s pirated and what’s legal (maybe I’m sending myself a copy of a song so I can listen to it somewhere else). AT&T wants to get into the content-police business.

Verizon is a lot smarter. Said Tom Tauke, its EVP for public affairs,

Once you start going down the path of looking at the information going down the network, there are many that want you to play the role of policeman. Stop illegal gambling offshore. Stop pornography. Stop a whole array of other kinds of activities that some may think inappropriate.

Exactly.

So I won’t use Comcast, even when DirecTV’s monopoly on the NFL runs out, and I certainly won’t use any AT&T product. There are better alternatives.

Note to Comcast users: There are simple ways to bypass the company’s filtering. Read about them here.