Basically, the whole principle of Net Neutrality (as I understand it without knowing the details of the U.S. law, much less the European one) is: you bill data in the last mile to the consumer and you are not allowed to charge them based on the semantics or origin of the data. You do not charge the provider at all, unless they are the direct ISP you are peering with. You can however, give the customer a fast lane and a slow lane if you want, with different caps, and they can tell you which traffic they want you to get to them faster.

As far as I understand it, nothing prevents the hospital to get:

Connection 1: Availability guarantee 99.999%, bandwidth 150Gbps max with 50Gbps dedicated, RTT for last mile: <=80ms

Connection 2: Normal, small business grade connection.

Then the hospital can use connection 1 for critical medical equipment and connection 2 for everything else. But, they could do just the reverse (why would they?) and the ISP would need to abide by connection 1's guarantees regardless of content (assuming the upstream connection from the provider is also good enough).

The problem occurs if I, an entrepreneur, want to solve the hospital's problem for them, and sell them a single connection that meets their application-specific needs. I'd set it up so that I could always meet their demands, and a sensible way to do that would be with app-specific routing rules. Also, to help make that peak, application-specific offering possible, it would likely help for me to sell other nearby connections that have much softer throughput/lag requirements – users who don't mind if the hospital's needs occasionally stall their YouTube/Netflix, because they're getting such a good deal most of the time on most of what they use.

NN regulations make such economically-sensible, mutually-beneficial business arrangements illegal. Everyone's got to buy the mandated, "neutral" service tiers – rather than other cheaper mixed-traffic-treatment formulas that could meet their needs.

I don't understand why you think the rules need to be application-specific or why you think the alternative would be more expensive.

If you want a high-bandwidth low-latency guaranteed-reliable fully-provisioned circuit then it's going to be expensive. Providing the same guarantees but only for a single application doesn't reduce the cost at all. If the customer is paying you to guarantee the delivery of packets, it doesn't cost you anything more if the customer then decides they're going to be YouTube packets rather than telemedicine packets. None of the things that cause that level of service to be expensive are application-specific so there is no savings to be had by treating applications differently.

It might be easier for the hospital to buy one pipe and then do the prioritization in-house.

Thank you for the clear, honest answer. So the great-grandparent post is misleading, and those in favor of government-enforced "net neutrality" do want to limit what I am "allowed to pay for as a consumer".

> Thank you for the clear, honest answer. So the great-grandparent post is misleading, and those in favor of government-enforced "net neutrality" do want to limit what I am "allowed to pay for as a consumer".

Phrasing it like that is political maneuvering. There is nothing you cannot get. No application is made not possible by network neutrality. There are only some things which, if you get them, the ISP has to provide for all your data and not just data for a particular application or source.

No, the regulations have made it illegal to purchase a service I might want to buy (or sell), instead requiring the purchase of a different "guaranteed neutral" service instead.

This new federally-mandated kind of service, as it meets extra legal constraints and prevents certain kinds of side-payments from happening, is almost certainly going to be more expensive and available from a smaller set of fewer, larger providers. (Title II/common-carrier regulation does nothing to create new provider competition, but rather assumes that monopoly is the only possibility and cements it into place.)

The "guaranteed neutral" service is a superset of the other service. You're complaining that you can't buy something when the reality is that you can't not buy something, which is different.

> This new federally-mandated kind of service, as it meets extra legal constraints and prevents certain kinds of side-payments from happening, is almost certainly going to be more expensive and available from a smaller set of fewer, larger providers.

You're talking like there is some kind of vigorous competition going on at present which is going to be impeded. And the side payments you're talking about don't make things cost less, they interfere with competition in other markets that actually are competitive, which would ultimately make things cost more.

> Title II/common-carrier regulation does nothing to create new provider competition, but rather assumes that monopoly is the only possibility and cements it into place.

That's because it is. Utilities are natural monopolies. The duopoly that was created by accident when telephone and cable TV both merged into internet has been a disaster.

The bulk of a last mile ISP's costs are based on the area they offer service in rather than the number of customers they have. A strand of fiber costs the same amount to install and maintain whether it carries the traffic of 100 customers or 200. That means if you want to have two ISPs you would have to pay almost twice as much for internet service at the same level of ISP infrastructure investment and profits because each ISP would have to cover all the same costs with half as many customers. If you want to talk about what makes things cost more, it's trying to "create competition" in a natural monopoly market.

A utility isn't a natural monopoly because the government said so, it's a natural monopoly because adding competition makes prices go up.

You can't sell yourself as a slave, though too.

The question of whether the restrictions are desirable is separate from whether "Net neutrality advocates have never, ever wanted to limit what you're allowed to pay for as a consumer."

Regulatory-NN advocates do in fact want to legally ban a class of services, with unmetered/prioritized data paths for certain applications (like perhaps "Wikipedia Zero"), that would have willing customers if available on the market.