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by happytoexplain 2839 days ago
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?
1 comments

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

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.