End-to-end principle
Main article: End-to-end principle
Some advocates say network neutrality is needed in order to maintain the end-to-end principle. According to Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney:
Net neutrality means simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet's wires cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant "end-to-end" design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for economic and social good.
—Lawrence Lessig & Robert W. McChesney:
Under this principle, a neutral network is a dumb network, merely passing packets regardless of the applications they support. This point of view was expressed by David S. Isenberg in his seminal paper, The Rise of the Stupid Network[32]
A new network "philosophy and architecture," is replacing the vision of an Intelligent Network. The vision is one in which the public communications network would be engineered for "always-on" use, not intermittence and scarcity. It would be engineered for intelligence at the end-user's device, not in the network. And the network would be engineered simply to "Deliver the Bits, Stupid," not for fancy network routing or "smart" number translation. ... In the Stupid Network, the data would tell the network where it needs to go. (In contrast, in a circuit network, the network tells the data where to go.) In a Stupid Network, the data on it would be the boss. ... End user devices would be free to behave flexibly because, in the Stupid Network the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type.
—David S. Isenberg The Rise of the Stupid Network
The seminal paper on the end-to-end principle, End-to-end arguments in system design by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark, instead argues that network intelligence doesn't relieve end systems of the requirement to check inbound data for errors and to rate-limit the sender, nor for a wholesale removal of intelligence in the network core.
Net Neutrality is one of the big issues that conservatives should be working for, in order to make sure that the government doesn't start to restrict according to content or any other contrived issues and make the "Internet" like a "dumb network" as outlined above, in order to protect freedoms (from government control, at least...).
When Congress speaks of it they redefine it to a sort of looter scheme that stifles more than it enhances.
The Internet has been relatively free of that sort of government interference, but this administration aims to change that.