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Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why
MojoKid writes Net neutrality is an attractive concept, particularly if you've followed the ways the cable and telco companies have gouged customers in recent years, but only to a limited extent. There are two problems with net neutrality as its commonly proposed. First, there's the fact that not all traffic prioritization is bad all of the time. Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly. Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example. Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people, or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency. These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.
My God... Please stop!
Peering has nothing to do with net neutrality.
Stop confusing the two.
No ISP has any legal, moral or regulatory obligation to connect to any specific peer. If they did, the peer could just charge whatever they wanted. It's up to the content provider and the ISP to work out who they want to use together. Those agreements are fraught with arguments, bullying, etc... it should be addressed by the FCC. But none of that has anything to do with Net Neutrality. If it did, the content provider could make a similar argument that "Those people living out on that island. We want them to have our service! You're violating Net Neutrality by not running a cable across the ocean floor!" The ISP as an independent business has the right to hookup whichever customers they want inside the guidelines of their franchise agreements with local towns... as well as whichever peers they want. Netflix can no more force them to use Level3 than the ISP can force Netflix to use a different peer (and that was the actual argument) The ISPs just said "No thanks. We'll do without." which was well within their rights.
A violation of Net Neutrality would be like "ok, we don't want you watching netflix so... Netlfix is priority 9999 on our sandvine... hahahaha!"
Netflix could, and did, fix their bandwidth issues by connecting to the peers the ISPs were ok with them using. Again, you could argue that Netflix should have had more bargaining power in that regard. The ISPs usually force content providers into using the ISPs subsidiary peers. But that's not a net neutrality issue. We almost lost the Net Neutrality battle over this stupid mixup of terms.
Thats why most services are marketed as up to the given speed. It actually is cheaper to offer a mostly full speed connection than a full speed connection. As long as they provide a defined minimum connection speed and don't default to that speed most of the time, then there really is no reason for complaint.