Net neutrality: no blocking or throttling

One benefit of net neutrality for organisations is that ISPs cannot block, slow or throttle their traffic, or prioritise traffic according to the ISP's own preferences.

Throttling means deliberately slowing down a connection or a particular service. Under net neutrality, an ISP cannot decide that one organisation's website should be slowed while another is sped up. It also cannot block a service, which would stop customers reaching it completely, or prioritise some traffic because it prefers that service or has a commercial interest in it.

This matters because an organisation's website and online services depend on ISPs delivering content at a fair speed and without interference. If an ISP could block or slow traffic, the organisation might lose customers, struggle to process orders or be unable to provide its online service reliably.

For example, a village bakery takes celebration cake orders through its website, and customers pay a deposit online. If an ISP throttled the bakery's site during a busy week or blocked it outright, customers would give up and buy from a supermarket instead, and the bakery would lose orders it had already planned to bake. The bakery has no way to force an ISP to deliver its pages at a fair speed.

Net neutrality is about equal treatment, not identical speeds: a small site may still load more slowly than a large one because of its own server, and ISPs can still carry out ordinary network management. What they cannot do is use that control to favour or disadvantage particular services or customers.