This means it can afford to be completely neutral with regard to the services and applications the customer accesses.
This is in contrast to a smart pipe where the operator affects the customer's accessibility of the Internet by either limiting the available services or applications to its own proprietary portal (like a walled garden) or offer additional capabilities and services beyond simple connectivity.
With the justification that the dumb network uniquely satisfies the requirements of the end to end principle for application creation, supporters see the dumb network as uniquely qualified for this purpose, as – by design – it is not sensitive to the needs of applications.
The first, that certain users and transmission needs of certain applications are more important than others and thus should be granted greater network priority or quality of service.
The security argument is that malware is an end-to-end problem and thus should be dealt with at the endpoints and that attempting to adapt the network to counterattacks is both cumbersome and inefficient.