You may have heard about ‘Net Neutrality’ or perhaps ‘Internet Neutrality’. You may have heard nice things about it. I’m telling you it’s a bad idea. The idea behind Net Neutrality sounds good, unless you understand how networks work.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute addresses ‘Neutrality. Their concern seems aimed at pricing flexibility — the lack thereof — under neutrality rules.
As someone in the Internet business, I can say with certainty that some services require priority and should be given special treatment to get them delivered promptly. You may not have used a VoIP (Voice over IP) phone yet, but I guarantee you that you will want VoIP packets (groups of message bytes) delivered promptly. Try to imagine a conversation on the phone with the other party cutting in and out because the message stream is interrupted periodically to handle other packets ‘equally’.
We’ve probably all experienced jerky video because something got held up.
ISPs and other network managers understand that some Internet services require that the network packets associated with that service be given priority. We give such packets priority. We restrict others as being of a lower priority and not time sensitive. Some things we block entirely so as to be able to deliver the things that matter.
Under innocuous-sounding “Net Neutrality” rules, I could not prevent some kid who’s downloading pirated movies from hogging so much bandwidth that other customers cannot collect their email.