The internet has a multitude (but getting smaller) number of wide area carriers... that meet at various locations around the nation ( and world) known as Internet Exchange Point or simply Exchanges (a long time ago they were very few of these (like 3) that were called MAE (West and East... a sort of play on a name). I should know as I contributed some equipment (one of the world's first gigabit ethernet switches) to MAE West back in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Anyway, these long-distance carriers have various "common carrier" agreements to carry the traffic originating with other local ISPs to the destination somewhere else (like, say, the servers that now host democraticunderground). However, Comcast (which is both a local ISP and a common carrier) might decide to not connect to DU (or Netflix) and could decide to rewrite those common carrier agreements to allow it to shape this traffic to its own corporate policies. What would then happen is that DU traffic (or Netflix or Hulu) would be forced onto another common carrier set of links (if you are interested, use traceroute to see the number of hops between your computer or phone and the server you are getting data from).

So even if the local ISP at both ends signed up to be Net Neutral, unless there is a corresponding WAN common carrier with the capacity to carry the entire internet, you could still experience non-net neutrality from the policies of a Comcast or AT&T.


# traceroute www.democraticunderground.com
traceroute to www.democraticunderground.com (52.4.189.133), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1) 1.793 ms 2.902 ms 3.802 ms
2 96.120.14.229 (96.120.14.229) 22.807 ms 23.342 ms 23.593 ms
3 ae-201-sur03.tracy.ca.ccal.comcast.net (68.87.203.241) 24.100 ms 24.653 ms 24.882 ms
4 ae-63-ar01.fresno.ca.ccal.comcast.net (68.87.202.81) 26.739 ms 26.248 ms ae-62-ar01.sacramento.ca.ccal.comcast.net (68.87.202.73) 27.158 ms
5 be-33667-cr01.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.93.25) 35.894 ms be-33667-cr02.losangeles.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.93.37) 41.185 ms be-33667-cr01.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.93.25) 37.447 ms
6 be-11524-cr02.dallas.tx.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.87.174) 69.229 ms be-11025-cr02.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.87.157) 18.956 ms 18.941 ms
7 be-11015-cr02.losangeles.ca.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.86.98) 28.565 ms 27.644 ms be-12495-pe03.1950stemmons.tx.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.85.194) 56.560 ms
8 66.208.233.34 (66.208.233.34) 55.752 ms 59.475 ms be-11524-cr02.dallas.tx.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.87.174) 64.736 ms
9 * be-12495-pe03.1950stemmons.tx.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.85.194) 62.054 ms 69.867 ms
10 66.208.233.34 (66.208.233.34) 68.873 ms * 54.180 ms
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 54.240.229.217 (54.240.229.217) 94.082 ms * 54.240.229.171 (54.240.229.171) 94.916 ms
15 * * *
16 54.239.110.135 (54.239.110.135) 100.053 ms * 54.239.110.233 (54.239.110.233) 137.367 ms
17 * 54.239.108.233 (54.239.108.233) 85.510 ms *
18 54.239.108.97 (54.239.108.97) 84.357 ms 54.239.110.141 (54.239.110.141) 103.095 ms 54.239.110.213 (54.239.110.213) 100.383 ms
19 54.239.108.199 (54.239.108.199) 93.594 ms 205.251.244.91 (205.251.244.91) 90.002 ms 54.239.111.23 (54.239.111.23) 96.916 ms
20 * * *
21 * * 72.21.197.253 (72.21.197.253) 102.258 ms
22 * * *
23 * * *
24 * * *
25 * * *
26 * * *
27 * * *
28 * * *
29 * * *
30 * * *

As you can tell I live in CA... and my traffic to DU stays on Comcast all the way to Dallas... then gets diverted to some random network that we don't know the name of (no DNS entries) for the rest of the trip to DU.

The "ibone" names are likely Comcast's naming conventions for their long distance "backbone" WAN networks.