Online business Toolkit
Story: Why you should care about net neutrality
Two separate arguments
So those in favour of net neutrality say that "ISPs should ... not favour traffic from one online service or content supplier over another"
Those against say "if service providers are not allowed to give some types of content priority over others, many users of the internet will end up experiencing a poor quality of service."
Folks, these are two completely separate arguments.
The main concern of those in favour of net neutrality is the net should not discriminate between network traffic on the basis of who it came from or who it is going to, or what company or organisation supplied the end-point software.
But those who are against net neutrality (say they) want to be able to discriminate between network traffic of different kinds (e.g. gaming, peer-to-peer file sharing, VOIP, etc).
Isn't it clear that these two things are perfectly compatible?
It is quite acceptable to prioritise real-time traffic such as streaming video or VOIP over non-realtime traffic such as peer-to-peer file sharing or email.
What would be unacceptable would be to discriminate between streaming video from Google, and streaming video from a small independent organisation.
My biggest concern is that those against net neutrality are deliberately conflating the two issues to try to dupe people into believing that you can't have prioritisation of certain types of traffic without allowing discrimination based on the provider too.
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