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Network Neutrality is typically defined in terms of traffic sources, not use. It's both expected and encouraged that ISPs will differentiate between different types of packets based on what they contain.

For example, it would be obviously bad for Comcast to place Netflix at the bottom of the QOS stack, but perfectly reasonable to do so with Bittorrent.




Comcast should not be maintaining a QOS stack. Period. That is a violation of net neutrality.


You are using a definition of net neutrality that differs from everyone else's. In the interest of conversational clarity, you ought to pick a different term.

All residential ISPs sell more aggregate consumer capacity than total peering capacity, because very few users require the full use of their connection at all times. This permits their users' bills to be much lower, a tradeoff that is obviously beneficial to almost everyone.

Overprovisioning absolutely requires the use of QOS and throttling. If my neighbor decides to torrent a hundred terabytes of ATLAS data, that should (ideally) not cause any of my DNS or RTP packets to be dropped.


"Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication."[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

ISPs should stop overprovisioning if it prevents them from being neutral to my packets.


He's using the same definition of "net neutrality" I was using...

What do you mean by it?


My understanding is that net neutrality is when the ISP does not prioritize/throttle/block traffic based on sender or recipient.

This definition permits traffic shaping based on content, such as dropping bittorrent packets to preserve dns/rtp latency on a link shared between customers.


Net neutrality isn't simply about sender/recipient, it's also about type of packet. Mandated QoS is a direct violation of net neutrality.


Interesting, thanks


No, it's not perfectly reasonable.




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