Net Neutrality is also about not adding pennies of ‘usefulness’ tax to things we take for granted. It’s a statement saying that all 1s and 0s are equal – when they plainly are not.

Mobile operators like O2 and AT&T are blocking VoIP on iPhone for instance. That means we have to use our ‘minutes’ which eventually run out and we have to pay more – that’s adding a premium to the 1s and 0s of our digital communications.

What if they added a 10p tax onto every download from the AppStore?

The examples you give are just standard price premiums/differentiation. It’s the same as a a bar in the city centre charging more for a pint than one in the country. Different prices for the same pint.

Net neutrality is different. Net neutrality is insisting that nobody can be given faster or “priority” bandwidth just because they pay more.

A real life example would be auctioning off the use of the bus lanes to the highest bidder. In theory this would be the most efficient way to maximise the revenue from our road networks, but it wouldn’t be in the public interest.

Similarly if a big company like Amazon could pay to get the best speeds on all our broadband networks, it would limit competition as all new startups that try compete couldn’t afford to deliver pages as quickly as Amazon could. This would take away from one of the best features of the net, that any new business that’s good enough can thrive.

In theory there’s no reason that phone companies can’t auction off their best bandwidth to the highest bidder, but in practice stopping them doing this with Net Neutrality policies is necessary for the greater good.