[charleslmunger]

There's shades of grey here - anything you lay in a fixed diameter conduit is competing for bandwidth in the sense that you could pull another wire.

Consider an alternate history, where TV was invented after the internet. ISPs propose to offer TV service (exempt from data caps of course) at the expense of last mile bandwidth, which is otherwise subject to caps. I think that would be recognized as a net neutrality violation.

It feels unreasonable because we know the cost of providing television service scales with the number of subscribers, not the usage per subscriber. Of course, that's also true for internet service outside peak hours - a fixed monthly cap does not match the unit costs of providing internet at all.

I think pragmatic regulation would exempt existing cases like this. We wouldn't permit a new case like it in the future, though.