Technical NetNeutrality

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First clear out what net neutrality actually is. And I am not going to give weird analogy like water pipe or highways. While those analogies are good to give a non technical person some idea, they don’t necessarily address all of internets details, hence a bit inaccurate. So let’s break down how internet actually works without getting into too much technicality. You can go ahead and read the Wikipedia [1] article if you want more details.
When you search something, for example, www.google.com, the first thing that happens is that name is gets resolve to an address (IP) using DNS protocol [2]. Then ISP uses a routing table to locate that address. You can even see how that works by using traceroute command (tracert for windows, traceroute for linux and mac). After establishing a connection between the server at that address and your machine using a process called three way handshake [3], data transfer can begin. Data is transferred in form of packets [4] of same size. Your ISPs job is to facilitate that transfer. Keep in mind that there are different protocols for different applications, what I explained here is TCP, which is is the general protocol used by most applications.
Now, net neutrality means that your ISP cannot discriminate on data transfer depending on which server you connect to. Without net neutrality, you ISP has the power to drop packets to and from certain servers, making them send the packet again, essentially slowing the speed. That is commonly known as throttling [4].
Throttling can also be used in servers or network administrator at your job for load balancing [5] purposes. ISPs do throttling sometimes to free up congested traffic to lower the amount of data they need to process at once, saving them the need to buy more and faster equipment to handle Internet traffic at that level [6]. But more commonly it is used for bandwidth capping, means if you try to transfer packets faster than your contracted speed, excess packets will be dropped.
Net neutrality simply stops ISPs to throttle or block data transfer based on their bias to certain web services.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
[3] http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/computer-network-tcp-3-way-handshake-process/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#TCP_segment_structure
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(computing)
[6] https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-bandwidth-throttling-2625808


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