Even if advocates for net neutrality win the battle at the FCC over “no discrimination” rules, they could still lose the war if ISPs subvert the spirit of those rules by applying chokepoints at deeper layers of the internet. For practical purposes, this would mean that any internet traffic would reach your house at the same speed — but that some types of that traffic, especially from video-heavy websites like Netflix, would arrive in a degraded condition.

This, anyway, is the fear of Level 3(s lvlt), a content-delivery network, and one of the companies raising the alarm over ISPs that demand “tolls” behind the scenes to guarantee certain types of internet traffic get passed through to the end customer.

On Monday, Level 3 proposed in a blog post that the FCC adopt interconnection rules that would require ISPs to accept traffic without requiring a fee beyond what they charge to their customers:

If Internet content is delivered locally – in the ISP’s…