Yes, it is.
Packets are packets. They all get sorted and delivered equally and agnostically, whether they are cat videos or cardiac teleconference. If that is not happening, then that is a capacity/routing issue, not a legal one.
Would you also claim, Mr. McClintock, that the Government seized unprecedented control over elections under the guise of Suffrage? Is Suffrage the notion that all votes should be treated equally, regardless whether they come from white men, black women, etc.? Here's a hint: YES IT IS.
You're talking about technicality, I'm talking about the appeal to emotion. Net Neutrality is
not the statement that cat videos are of equal importance to hospital information. It is the statement that data is data, and companies have to treat data in the way that they've promised to. You're right that if cat videos are keeping cardiac teleconferencing from happening, then it's a capacity/routing issue, but the general public doesn't realize that, and that's why I'm saying this guy is wrong.
He's wrong because there is
zero technical reason why a cat video should ever cause a problem with a teleconferencing call. The hospital is free to set it up it's own network so that it's own system sets priority to video conferencing (this is already done by businesses, and they're still free to block whatever content they want). The hospital is also free to pay the ISP for a dedicated business line, as businesses have done for years, both major institutions and small offices. They don't have to share bandwidth the way most residential connections do (and presumably still will, even under net neutrality). Lastly the backbone connection between those business lines should have more than enough capability to transfer all the cat videos and CAT scans everyone who paid for internet connections could want.
What he's implying is that what I've described isn't the case. He's implying that somewhere in the chain is the inability for both types of communication to happen at the same time, and
that is not how the internet functions. Net Neutrality is not saying "we have to choose between frivolous and serious communication", because that choice doesn't exist. It's a statement based on false assumptions. It's not false because he's wrong about cat videos being sent with the same speed as echocardiograms, it's false because of even implying that Youtube should ever impact a medical consultation in any way shape or form, other than from incompetence on the part of the ISPs.
