&gt; This is how net neutrality dies, if we&#x27;re not careful.<p>Net neutrality has been dead for a long time. Honestly it was never a reality, and always more of an ideal. Transit agreements for CDNs and asymmetric peering arrangements have been commonplace since the mid-90s.<p>&gt; For me, it&#x27;s strict - the carrier is carrying bits and bytes, and doesn&#x27;t know&#x2F;care what they are.<p>I think a lot of people on the Internet also share this belief, but it is incompatible with the way residential broadband connections are currently priced and sold. Residential broadband uses a lot of traffic management tricks to deliver high-performance last-mile access -- and those traffic management tricks drive down operating costs dramatically to the point where it&#x27;s possible to have a $60&#x2F;mo broadband plan.<p>At least T-Mobile is being transparent here: they&#x27;re using a network management trick to allow them to offer unlimited data to their customers at a lower cost. Consumer last-mile access is all about making these kinds of compromises, and at least T-Mobile is giving its customers a choice to opt-in to a network management scheme rather than just using a hard cap.<p>If you want totally net-neutral Internet access, it is available to you in the form of a commercial broadband connection (fiber &#x2F; metro ethernet). It&#x27;s also a lot more expensive because the ISPs can&#x27;t oversubscribe their infrastructure in the same way and still meet their SLAs -- but those customers are paying for a higher level of service.