> UPS doesn't care if it is a Nike shirt or a Gucci shirt in a box, They just deliver the box where it is meant to go. Why should it be any different for an ISP?

While I like NN there is a strict different between an ISP and UPS because of the digital/physical realm.

When UPS delivers a Nike shirt they have to deliver that specific shirt to that specific person. An ISP needent deliver a specific shirt that originated from Nike Factory to that specific person; they can give a "locally" stored copied of the shirt. This means that the ISP could locally store say the top 4 million songs and so the expense of delivering those songs is practically zero while transporting a song from LA to NYC covers significantly more miles of fiber.

My privacy is my own. The ISP does not have a right whatsoever to determine whether it has content I want. The content that the ISP has is tainted specifically because it's not the exact content that I wanted. It's not the same bitrate, it's not the same quality, it's not the same lack-of-advertisements, and it's not the same guarantee of privacy.

It's not particularly enlightening to point out that two things in an analogy are different – if they weren't, the analogy would be useless. "An apple is like an apple." Okay.

An ISP that wishes to store a "local copy" of t-shirts or songs, in order to make more money, can store a Nike t-shirt just as easily as a Gucci t-shirt, and can store a Nikki Minaj song just as easily as a Gucci Mane song. Thus, nothing actually blocks the ISP from treating the two equally.

Alternatively, the ISP can store nothing, and just be a basic ISP. Nobody is forcing them to store anything, much less do so preferentially depending on brand. And if they personally choose to, to make more money, it's their responsibility to make sure they don't differentiate between brands, because that violates net neutrality.

Amazon has distributed warehouses, when I order that Patagucci shirt, it could be any one of many from several warehouses.

So what?

I would honestly be shocked if UPS didn't have different agreements with big shippers.

They do, big shippers pay less because they cost less to support and UPS makes it up in volume. Pirateship.com takes advantage of that discounted volume rate, compare their prices to the ones on UPS’s website.

So UPS is not acting as a "common carrier" in the way the previous poster was claiming.

Of course they do, its just invisible to the consumer. It is way cheaper for amazon to ship something via UPS than it is for you, because Amazon and UPS have negotiated contracts in place.

Seems like a bad analogy given the existence of "free" shipping vs additional charge.

Which is a specialty service offering set up and agreed upon by buyer and seller of the service using the dumb pipe.

So, opt-in versus required. Net neutrality certainly allows special pipes and protocols to be set up where desired, if you desire to stretch the analogy beyond its intent.

UPS doesn't care. The sender/receiver care and may want to use the insurance option. But UPS knows the value / type of passage, not the contents.

UPS literally asks you what it is! They ask if its a weapon, has lithium batteries, etc. This analogy is bad.

UPS cares if you are shipping something that is a physical or legal hazard for them, because they are responsible for the safety of their employees, facilities, and the other packages.

If you can make a reasonable argument that one kind of data or another creates a meaningful hazard for the pipe that carries it, please do.

I just think this analogy sounds like someone who has never actually shipped something. There are many rules for shipping—-it is silly to say that UPS just takes the box and ships it without a care. UPS cares if the content is fragile, illegal, dangerous to ship, overweight, alive, high value, perishable, tobacco, magnetic.. the list goes on and on.

You are not in the right on this one. Your argument is drifting far away from what net neutrality even is.

UPS does not care what what they're carrying unless it shits or explodes. Anything meeting most of your criteria, they simply will not ship in the first place. Net neutrality specifically mitigates rent-seeking behavior, implying if UPS knew there was something expensive in the box, they'd shake you down for more money to ship it. The only time they do this is in handling hazmat.

They sort of do this in reverse though when it comes to damage claims. They'll first try to find a reason not to pay out, but once they know what's in the box, they angle to reimburse you the least possible amount of money for it. I can't tell you how many times we would lose/destroy priceless stuff like a signed baseball from some World Series and write a check...for the $3 it cost to buy a new baseball (TBF, especially with prototypes/historical artifacts, many such claims are dog-ate-my-homework fraudulent).

Here's an actual case: a container ship carrying designer leather products from Italy took on water and a claim was made for $100k worth of retail losses. We were never going to pay that, since there's no guaranteeing any amount of it would have sold at that price, and anybody that makes money from loss is either profiteering or committing fraud (see: coffin ship). The most we would have paid out was at the price the factory sold it to the designer for ($2-$10 per diem), but IIRC we denied it since no damage was reported along the way. They didn't insure anything, on paper $100k worth of product was lost, and they didn't give a shit-- in reality they lost $2k in drop-shipped crap stamped with an expensive logo. Designer goods are inherently worthless.

Net neutrality is, quite literally, treating all packets of data the same, not caring about what type of data it is. An analogy that says it’s like UPS, because UPS will ship any box and it doesnt care about what’s in it, is a bad analogy because UPS will gladly refuse to ship many things—-it DOES care what’s in the box.

They care about own safety, not about the service segmentation here. If the packets themselves could be dangerous for some reason (for example exploits for the core routing hardware), of course net neutral ISPs would drop them too.