Good question. The main problem with all of these is proof. How do you determine intent of a dropped packet? Was it congestion, a hardware failure, or did the ISP have it in for that packet specifically? The guy screaming "I'm gonna kill you!" is the top suspect when someone turns up dead, but the cops still have to prove he did it.

When Comcast was using Sandvine Comcast denied, denied, denied that they were doing anything to degrade their users' internet experience. It took the EFF and a massive coordinated traffic logging effort to prove that Comcast was lying about intentionally disabling Lotus Notes (and BitTorrent) connections.

a costlier service

There is very little technical reason for a byte of amazon to cost more than a byte of wikipedia. Once those packets reach the backbone networks (a process that Amazon and Wikipedia both pay for through their ISPs) they're essentially identical, except in the fact that Amazon has more money and they have more to lose if something were to happen to that packet, and that would be a real shame.

The original plan was simply "neutrality". All bytes are equal. More bytes can cost more money, but those additional bytes are equal too.

And that's where it started falling apart. Bytes delivered by copper all cost the same, bytes delivered by fiber all cost the same, bytes delivered by avian carrier all cost the same. Bytes delivered wirelessly... well, they cost the same too but some major neutrality players were doing deals with telcos to provide some services free on phones. Which was more important to them, neutrality? Or getting wikipedia to the mobile masses with no data charges? Well, as long as the net was mostly neutral (except when it suited them) it's a good thing, right? But hypocrisy is the moral rot, and rot spreads quickly.

Personally, I have two horses in this race: in my personal life I'm an internet user, at work I develop web applications. I had my experience with value-subtracted ISPs years ago. Before Time Warner traded an agreement not to compete here with Comcast for an agreement from Comcast not to compete elsewhere, one of our customers had Time Warner Cable at their office. One day I get an angry call from them that we're down. I check the status of our servers and say "no, we're up" and they insist we're down and I ask them if we're down why are they the only customer calling me. They insist. I do a traceroute from the development server and everything looks fine to me. They continue to insist. I remote into their computer and sure enough, the application isn't loading. I open a ticket with our colocation facility to let them know that some routing is fucked up specifically between IPs A and B. It's closed: nothing wrong. I tell them to call their ISP. TWC insists its on our end. I roll my eyes and mirror their database on the development server and call it a day. Day 2: we're "down" again. Neither the main server nor the development server are reachable from that customer now. TWC insists its on our end. I set up a mirror on our mail server. Day 3: we're down again. We have a three-way call with TWC. TWC insists it's on our end. I tell them that every single one of our customers using DSL are having no problems at all and offer to pay the cancellation fee so our customer has internet that works. (By this time I had reviewed all of our server logs and discovered that they were literally our only user in the city coming from TWC, everyone else had DSL). Tier 2 support is on the phone in 15 seconds. Now, this is probably about a decade or so ago, so these are not the exact words used but I won't forget the general gist of it any time soon:

Tier2: We changed a setting in their router to allow them to access their "business application". Everything should be fine now
Qz: Thank you. For future reference if we have other customers on TWC what setting is this so we can make sure it's configured correctly and avoid this problem in the future?
Tier2: Oh, it's not a setting that the customer can change.

So, what is the intent of a setting that blocks access to an ISP user's commonly used websites?

They are usually quickly fixed but not quickly updated by end users. That's the problem with all OSes. The advantage of OSS is that you have the option of fixing it yourself if the software creator doesn't.

Thank you for explaining that; I'd missed that nuance to it.

Maybe this points to one of the inherent problematicnesses [new word there] of regulating business. That is, how does one decide (and who does the deciding) at what point is charging more for a costlier service being done for anti-competitive reasons?

Well, it's not the space cadets in academia who sit around and ponder how everything is relative that I'm worried about. It's the more pragmatic Lefties who have delusions that everything in society can be equalized (given the application of sufficient coercive power).

And yes, it's about all those things, to amass enough political power to install Progressively greater levels of "fairness"*. But it's not about burning the culture just to have an orgy or something. It's because our culture was based on a totally different values system.

*AKA economic and social justice.

by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service

Close.

The original plan was to tell carriers that they can't make Vonage and Skype a premium level service (add the voip package for only $15/mo!) to prevent them from competing with their phone service (only $9.99!). Or make Netflix an unusable service to stop customers from cutting cable. Or make browsing Amazon difficult because Barnes & Noble paid them to. Or sell 90% of the bandwidth they sold to me to their "fast lane" partners, while the sites I actually want to see get the last 10% of the bandwidth I paid for.

Much like the Occupy Movement, nobody took control to keep the message on point and eventually the whole thing devolved into a flaming mess, helped along by the telcos themselves spouting bullshit about how network neutrality meant you couldn't pay more for faster internet.

But being in support of common carrier laws, that apply to the whole country, would not be even Left-leaning libertarian. It would have to be collectivism, that was completely voluntary. I'm pretty sure that's not what pro Net Neutrality folk were about.

Well summed-up. The only nuance that might be missing is what they have in common (besides being a waste of time, that is). And that is, whether or not fusta is an equal opportunity troller (across the political spectrum) or only targets Conservatives like DR.

I may post a JE some time soon about modern sleazy web programming tactics I'm noticing, such as on that site.

Only when it comes to God's morality. For example, downplaying the truth that it's much better for children to be raised in a two-parent household of both sexes. But when it comes to their man-made morality, there is no unwavering in for example their belief that it's a truism that more "fairness" = more betterness, ad infinitum.

is your definition of that due to your political positions or is it a moral absolute?

Actually, it's pretty easy to decide if something is a moral absolute or not: If it's OK for everyone to do it then you can, if it's not OK for everyone to do it, then you Kant.

"As late as last year, I remember Net Neutrality being a libertarian free market concept"

All I've ever seen about it is Left-wingers saying we must have it. I've gathered that it's about getting government to interfere with the free market, by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service.

BTW, from just seeing your side of the conversation I'd have to guess that you were talking with fustawhatever. Because while DR tries to confound and confuse Conservatives by saying everything that's up is down and vice-versa, fusta's trademarked tactic against Righties as I recall is to pelt with accusations (none of which s/he can hold up, of course). I guess the idea is to take you off your game and from thinking clearly about the issues to thinking about how on earth someone could accuse you of such things and how you can explain that they're not true. (Hey, I never said it wasn't a brilliant tactic!)