[Iv]

Net neutrality is about content-neutrality and origin/destination neutrality. It is not opposed to give packets higher priority when there is a technical reason for this.

Having a protocol and routes that guarantee low ping but require low bandwidth makes sense to me. A lot of the current infrastructure is built for TCP: something that can handle losses and actually uses packet loss to maximize its bandwidth use.

Having specific shortcuts to open fast lines do not threaten net neutrality. For instance, I think game devs, would love if you could "reserve" 10KB/s of the lowest ping you have, out of your 500 MB/s "bandwidth budget" and reserve it to a given port.

And note that it is not just games that require it. Telepresence applications are limited also because of this problem.

[fragmede]

There are also technical reasons why Netflix (or any other company significantly affected by net-neutrality) needs to pay Comcast extra in order for their packets to get higher priority, so everyone can watch on Netflix without stuttering and drop-outs.

Paying for higher-priority traffic/more bandwidth looks very, very similar to paying for traffic not be throttled. Some might argue it's the same thing.

IMO the difference is that backbone packet transit is different than end-user ISP transit. Unfortunately net-neutrality gets very muddy with, eg Verizon being both the backbone and the end-user ISP. Netflix network engineers are keenly aware of transit, which is part of the reason why they run their own CDN.

[mikepurvis]

A protocol like that would be terrific because then each hop along the path would know exactly what is going on without needing to have explicit rules built in or be making it up based on heuristics and DPI.