Netflix CFO David Wells, in comments at an industry conference, said the company's preference was that broadband Internet service should not be regulated by the U.S. government as a telecommunications utility — appearing to backtrack on Netflix's previous stance on the issue, although the company later said that its position remained unchanged.

Last year, Netflix urged the FCC to reclassify broadband as a telecom service, under Title II of the Communications Act. In a July 2014 filing, Netflix said that "Title II provides [the FCC with] a solid basis to adopt prohibitions on blocking and unreasonable discrimination by ISPs. Opposition to Title II is largely political, not legal."

But Wells said that the FCC's adoption of Title II regulations covering broadband was not, in fact, Netflix's preferred outcome. On Wednesday, Wells — speaking at the 2015 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco — said that, while the streaming-video company wanted to see "strong" net neutrality measures to ensure content providers would be protected against ISPs charging arbitrary interconnection fees, Netflix ultimately wanted the situation resolved without government intervention.

"Were we pleased it pushed to Title II? Probably not," Wells said at the conference. "We were hoping there might be a non-regulated solution."

Net neutrality and 5G may be on a collision course as the mobile industry tries to prepare for a wide range of mobile applications with differing needs.

The net neutrality rules passed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission last week have raised some eyebrows at Mobile World Congress this week. The full text of the rules isn't public yet, but mobile movers and shakers are having their say. The latest questions involve 5G, the next-generation standard that everyone here is trying to plan for.

The most common thing they think 5G will have to do is to serve a lot of different purposes. Regulators' attempts to ban "fast lanes" and other special treatment might make that impossible, people who've been thinking about 5G said Wednesday.

Industrial sensors, self-driving cars and other emerging uses of the Internet have needs that can't be met by a general-purpose network, Ericsson Group CTO Ulf Ewaldsson said during a panel discussion. That's driving a global discussion on a so-called "industrial Internet" alongside the regular Internet that's grown up around the Web and other consumer activities, he said.

Regulatory efforts like the FCC's rules don't see a distinction, Ewaldsson said. He didn't slam the agency for this but said the mobile industry needs to do a better job of explaining what it's trying to do. Most importantly, it's not trying to block or throttle people's access to the Internet, he said.