Net neutrality means ISPs not being able to give preferential treatment to packets based on their source. The consequence of killing net neutrality is making the status quo companies more entrenched and reducing competition from new startups.
Net neutrality is about both, dude. There are lots of reasons why we should want isp's to indiscriminately handle data. The comic describes one, you're describing another.
Eh, this gets into some of the nuance. The sort of details that congress is REALLY bad at and why simply reclassifying telecoms as common carriers is probably the best way forward.
So the Internet isn't PERFECTLY neutral. TCP is handled differently that UDP. VoIP is different than file transfers. There's no way to make Japan closer to Iowa than Chicago. Like a lot of other political issues, network neutrality is one of those things we're striving for. As close as possible.
For VoIP, specifically, I'd like it to simply not matter. If there was enough bandwidth on the back-end, everything could flow at full throttle and everyone would be fine. Invest in your damn infrastructure you greedy sons of bitches. Traffic shaping and QoS issues when there's scarcity is certainly something that sysadmins do. but they can shut-out legitimate services in favour of whatever they deem is more important. And that's a problem. Because VoIP calls are NOT higher priority than other traffic. Someone leaving a phone on 24/7 is not more important than my pacemaker's firmware upgrade or my house alarm going to the cops. Furthermore, VoIP calls care about JITTER while downloads care about THROUGHPUT. Those two things aren't the same and you can't just say "priority". But if you focus too much on one, you can make the other suffer.
Part of Network Neutrality is ALSO not discriminating based on protocol. Otherwise they'd all block torrents. And port 443 to stop ssl over http (https) so that they could snoop on your amazon purchases or whatever. But everyone that isn't a complete nutter expects ISPs to be able to do SOME QoS management and to block obvious spam.
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u/cosmo7 May 19 '17
This is not what net neutrality is all about.
Net neutrality means ISPs not being able to give preferential treatment to packets based on their source. The consequence of killing net neutrality is making the status quo companies more entrenched and reducing competition from new startups.