From a technical standpoint it’s far easier to be net neutral than throttle traffic which takes processing power, energy, and programmer time to do so. This is entirely about the ISPs making yet more money.

From a technical standpoint, it's far easier to provide no connectivity at all, but there's not much revenue in doing nothing.

There's a lot of revenue in charging both sides for connectivity, so it doesn't matter which is "easier", only what is more profitable.

I think the problem stems from ISPs also in large part being the telecommunications platforms. The internet is impeding their ability to sell TV channels and telephone subscriptions, so they are trying to wring that money from their internet businesses.

Just imagining life as an ISP in a network neutral world…

What do you need to have in place if someone alleges you are not neutral? Your accuser might present well collected evidence that Hulu performance to your customers is worse than Netflix's performance. You will then claim "but we didn't do it, it is just the luck of the draw on how we choose to buy interconnect bandwidth". Is that good enough to protect you? How can you prove you didn't choose the interconnects to screw Hulu?

So there is a burden. If there is no requirement, even if you never take money to slow down someone's competitor, you are relieved of this burden.

It's generally hard to prove a negative, but for this topic simply not having a DPI machine on your network resolves most of the question - route the packet and be done. The remaining constructive hazard is easily analyzed by whether specific links are habitually overwhelmed or not - private peering and edge cache boxen are optimizations, with the service yardstick still being the generic full Internet routes.

You could try not letting your network get consistently congested.

The packet passes through so many gateways and networks between Hulu and the end client good luck proving anything.

It's very burdensome when the alternative is accepting a pile of money in kickbacks and post-public-service stock options and employment in exchange for ignoring public demand.

I wasn't trying to be facetious. Just wondering if there is any technical difficulty in net neutrality.

I'm not an expert by any means but I imagine that, if anything, there would be increased technical difficulty in the throttling/blocking solutions that they want to introduce since that requires more logic than just giving people access to the Internet. That being said, they more than likely have all the infrastructure for monitoring/blocking/throttling/etc in place already and are just waiting for a green light to turn things on.

Ah, fair enough.

There is a burden, yes, because you've got to ensure that traffic to external networks is not unduly impeded. That means that as you expand your infrastructure, you've got to expand your interconnections to other ISPs. Additionally, if your competition expands, you may need to expand just to keep up. It's could make investment in infrastructure more expensive since you can't just grow; you've also got to upgrade. It the big players will feel like they need to create infrastructure that will be used by the little players, and the little players may feel like .

Of course, the above has to happen anyways because faster networks is one of the best ways to reduce costs and attract more customers. So the real issue is that if you don't do it, you'll get FCC regulators knocking on your door.

Here's what the FCC said Net Neutrality is in the FCC Open Internet Order (2010):

1. Transparency: Consumers and innovators have a right to know the basic performance characteristics of their Internet access and how their network is being managed;

2. No Blocking: This includes a right to send and receive lawful traffic, prohibits the blocking of lawful content, apps, services and the connection of non-harmful devices to the network;

3. Level Playing Field: Consumers and innovators have a right to a level playing field. This means a ban on unreasonable content discrimination. There is no approval for so-called "pay for priority" arrangements involving fast lanes for some companies but not others;

4. Network Management: This is an allowance for broadband providers to engage in reasonable network management. These rules don't forbid providers from offering subscribers tiers of services or charging based on bandwidth consumed;

5. Mobile: The provisions adopted today do not apply as strongly to mobile devices, though some provisions do apply. Of those that do are the broadly applicable rules requiring transparency for mobile broadband providers and prohibiting them from blocking websites and certain competitive applications;

6. Vigilance: The order creates an Open Internet Advisory Committee to assist the Commission in monitoring the state of Internet openness and the effects of the rules.

Interestingly, one of the chief arguments against Net Neutrality has been that it could allow regulatory capture. That's rather hilarious, given what's happened with this FCC chairman.

BGP peering is expensive. It's especially expensive when you have $encrypted_internet_video_provider which is almost entirely unidirectional data flow with zero caching possible. $encrypted_internet_video_provider wants the FCC, which has debatable authority on the matter, to instruct ISPs to pay for the bill of accepting that bandwidth on the networks ISPs own. In the case of cable company ISPs, bearing that cost to the benefit of a direct competitor.

If $encrypted_internet_video_provider wants to dictate how traffic is routed on a network, perhaps they should buy their own network.

As an example, Apple has over $200Billion stashed away in overseas accounts avoiding taxes. They could just buy Comcast, which has a market cap of $181Billion. Then it's their network, and they can run it however they see fit.

I bet Apple would rather have Comcast deal with the messy business of handling customer support for millions of boomers who can't "program" their VCR, while Apple siphons all the profits from online video streaming. That sounds a lot cheaper to owning and operating the networks themselves.

You've left out that the ISPs are being paid by their customers, for receiving the data from $encrypted_internet_video_provider on the customer's behalf!

If the ISPs don't want to be in the business of carrying data, then the answer is very simple - get out of the business and give back all that infrastructure that was built out with public resources!

I thought I am paying Comcast for making a certain bandwidth to me? Isn't that the deal?

You get that now. What $encrypted_internet_video_provider wants is a special fast lane directly into the ISPs' networks... at the ISPs expense, of course. Small time video hosting service will enter through the regular lanes. The fast lane will belong to the big boys. It's the opposite of the 'level playing field' argument that $encrypted_internet_video_provider is making. NN all basically comes down to who pays for the fast lane. $encrypted_internet_video_provider says, "Net neutrality! You pay half." ISP says, "It's a fast lane that only you use, and all the traffic is in one direction. You want it, you pay for it."

Nah NN has been implemented in various countries across the world. Fox News won't tell you that though.