[valarauca1]

TBH it is hilarious we believe "net neutrality" exists in the first place. Peering agreements between ISP's at IPX's are rarely "fair or neuatral" as different ISP's have different carrying capacity, and will treat traffic from their own networks preferentially for technical reasons.

But since <5k people understand BGP routing configuration we pretend it is neutral.

[kgwxd]

The term "net neutrality" is so overloaded at this point it's useless. Removing posts, throttling bandwidth, ISP/IPX negotiations, ISP protocol/domain treatment, ISP data collection, are all wildly different concerns that should each have unique names. I associate the term with the ISP protocol/domain treatment concern, as in ISPs should never use Application Layer variables to choose preferred routing, blocking, bandwidth allotment, etc.

[happytoexplain]

It's been my experience that all definitions of net neutrality explicitly allow prioritization for technical reasons (e.g. streaming). Is this fuzzier than I thought?

[valarauca1]

"technical reasons" is an awesome weasel word in the hands of the right c-level or legal representative.

[convolvatron]

"technical reasons" should be limited to things like the speed of light, or in this case the necessity to drop packets if the presented load exceeds the output rate of a link for more than the finite buffer can store.

everything else is policy - which means there is a choice. that choice might be heavily driven by economics, or by some kind of business strategy. but its pretty indefensible to say 'the crew in white coats down in the basement told me we just had to do it that way (shrug)'

so in the absence of speed-of-light issues, 'technical reasons' in this case is just a planet-sized loophole.

[happytoexplain]

Of course, but that's me saying that as a shorthand. I'm referring to the actual definitions in practice. I would hope they don't say "for technical reasons" and leave it at that.