Common use cases in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) deploy massive amounts of sensors and actuators that communicate with each other or to a remote cloud. While they form too large and too volatile networks to run on ultra-reliable, time-synchronized low-latency channels, participants still require reliability and latency guaranties. We elaborate this for safety-critical use cases. This paper focuses on the effects of networking protocols for industrial communication services. It analyzes and compares the traditional Message Queuing Telemetry Transport for Sensor Networks (MQTT-SN) with the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) as a current IETF recommendation, and also with emerging Information-centric Networking (ICN) approaches, which are ready for deployment. Our findings indicate a rather diverse picture with a large dependence on deployment: Publish-subscribe protocols are more versatile, whereas ICN protocols are more robust in multi-hop environments. MQTT-SN competitively claims resources on congested links, while CoAP politely coexists on the price of its performance.