That doesn't make sense. ISPs have long blocked "dangerous" or "premium" ports, like 445 (SMB) or 25 (SMTP). Those are parts of the contents of your internet packets and yet even the net neutrality regulation didn't prohibit doing that. And you can't argue those are "headers" rather than "contents" because then throttling packets based on IP addresses would not require looking at packet contents. So I think your definition is incorrect?
They can block mail from everyone, or they can allow it for everyone, but they cannot block or throttle a single provider.
That seems orthogonal to my comment. I was responding to the parent comment on what net neutrality even is, not trying to debate its merits.
It's an old & interesting debate about how data service ought to be billed. If 26 customers pay for 50MB/s service, most use 2MB/s, one uses 50MB/s, and the uplink is sparsely provisioned at 100MB/s, what is fair? One customer is using half the capacity of the link but only paying 1/26th of the costs, while the others are using 1/50th of the capacity and paying 1/26th the cost. Many might argue the one customer should be paying more.
They could send back a whole bunch of zero bytes to make the traffic symmetrical. They save everyone's resources by not doing that, yet somehow that means they should be charged...
The direction of the traffic is meaningless. What matters is the endpoint of the connection. ISPs should be happy to peer with anyone for traffic that has their users as an endpoint.
So then, concretely: say I have an expensive, faster link in my network. I don't look inside the packets, but I allow them to specify some flag in the header that indicates they want to use the fast link (and I keep track of which peer is requesting it to compare to how many such usages they've paid for).
Is that a NN violation? Is that harmful to the internet? Do current or proposed regulations allow it?
If the server the customer is connecting to is able to specify which link to use and the server pays the bill for that usage, that's a different matter. If a bad ISP implemented this and made the slow path absurdly slow, servers would be forced to use the fast link in order to access the ISPs' customers, and now the ISP is forcing Netflix et. al. to fork over money just to be able to access their customers. That will hurt the Internet, and current regulations do not allow it.
Lets say I'm an ISP and I build out 2 networks. 1 is 10 times faster than the other. Both end up at the same place and then go out to users.
If I offer companies the option of paying more for the faster network, why is that a problem?
In your scenario it certainly seems reasonable that I should be able to just switch off the slower network, and keep the new prices under the argument that I put in significant amounts of money to upgrade.
> If I offer companies the option of paying more for the faster network, why is that a problem?
If the company in question is a customer of the ISP, there is no problem. The problem I mentioned was when you, as a company, have to pay money not just to your own ISP, but to your customer's ISP, just to give them their data.
Is it harmful to the internet? Yes, because it promotes winners and losers. Not just from the consumer perspective. Maybe corporations can pay to have faster downlink to your customers using the same technology.
Current regulations do not allow it. Or, at the minimum, it's a grey area.
You might have seen your argument branded as an "internet fast lane," which I'd suspect would be so much of a fast lane as a slow lane for everyone else.
Simply net neutrality is your ISP ignoring the contents of your packets and simply routing them to their intended destination.
Repealing net neutrality would allow ISPs to more interesting traffic shaping based on the contents of the packets, e.g. allow unlimited data caps if the user pays for the ISP for unlimited netflix.
The pros for net neutrality are that the ISPs have historically done all of the practices that you mention. And actively practice them in countries like Portugal which have no net neutrality.
The con is that some sites are much heavier bandwidth than others, and do represent a much higher cost to the ISPs. For instance I've read that netflix takes more than 50% of North American bandwidth during peak hours. Repealing net neutrality would allow ISPs to have more flexible pricing models that in theory could allow the consumer cheaper broadband by choosing different traffic shaping options. In my opinion, this is unrealistic because ISPs are a natural monopoly in most places and thus the incentive is to skew pricing for what costs their routing infrastructure the least rather than be competitive with other ISPs.