"Speaking at an FCC roundtable Tuesday, Stanford University net neutrality scholar Barbara van Schewick said that, under certain conditions, letting Internet users individually control which Web sites were delivered at a faster or slower speed by their ISP would not violate the principle of net neutrality.
"The rules we propose would allow for user-controlled prioritization," van Schewick confirmed. She warned that for user-directed prioritization to work, however, it would have to give consumers the leverage. Broadband providers should not be able to discriminate among specific applications — Hulu versus Netflix, for example. Instead, discrimination would need to be "application-agnostic." Customers should be able to choose whether to enable prioritization, said van Schewick. And only consumers who opt in, not content companies, should have to pay for that extra layer of service, she said."