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Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality Is Already Gone
Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is "A Load of Bollocks". Anyone here been shaken down by their Internet Service Provider? "The new CEO of Virgin Media is putting his cards on the table early, branding net neutrality 'a load of bollocks' and claiming he's already doing deals to deliver some people's content faster than others... If you aren't prepared to cough up the extra cash, he says he'll put you in the Internet 'bus lane.'"
...is every one of his Slashdot-using customers running to cancel their accounts and find 'net access elsewhere - even if the data gets sent down a wet piece of string.
The point is not whether companies can get higher bandwidth by paying more. What has people angry is the idea that their cable provider might deny them the full bandwidth that they paid for when they connect to certain content providers or use VOIP.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Hell, ask the average Joe Sixpack if they'd like to have their American Idol episodes download faster at the expense of a bunch of pasty faced nerds not being able to access Slashdot at the same speed, I'm sure they'll be quite happy about it.
By what name do you wish to be mourned?
An anguished, collective shout of horror and surprise emanates from Virgin Media's PR department: "Nooooooooooo!!!"
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This blatant confession by Virgin Media is the best news yet for the Net Neutrality movement. Because the main argument of the enemies of Net Neutrality (who are therefore the promoters of Net Doublecharge) has always been that "equal access is never threatened", while usually contradictorily also saying "unequal access will be necessary to pay for increased capacity". Now Virgin Media is just admitting that's all a bunch of BS, and they're so hellbent on destroying the equal access for everyone that they already do it.
This is an industry claiming we don't need our equal access protected. And now, at the same time, telling us that it's gone, and we're whining too much because they've already destroyed it.
The enemy has blinked. There now should follow a backlash that will guarantee that we don't continue to give away our most profitable, most strategic global asset, that the public paid to invent, and build and promote, to those crooks who will say anything to steal it. And evidently are now so arrogant that they'll even admit they've already stolen it. Even though they haven't, or at least not so much that we can't take it back.
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Have you missed the whole Phorm issue, where BT have essentially admitted to illegally intercepting thousands of customers' data and giving it to an ex-spyware company?
Which they now plan to roll out across the board, with an opt-out clause that essentially says "we'll be collecting all the data anyway, but promise not to give it to anybody".
Net neutrality means you can't bill your competitor's customers. This is absolutely essential to a free market.
See, there are actually four parties involved. The end user, Bob, buys a connection from an ISP, CableCo. Meanwhile, example.com, buys a connection from a different ISP, ExampleOnline. CableCo and ExampleOnline are competitors, but they have a peering agreement, which means that they agree to share the costs of a connection which lets Bob visit example.com. What's happening here is that CableCo is trying to get money from example.com. But example.com is ExampleOnline's customer! If ExampleOnline's customers are generating traffic which CableCo can't handle, then they need to renegotiate their peering agreement, not go after ExampleOnline's customers. That's unethical and possibly illegal.
He's a wealthy CEO. He owns a big condo near the corporate office and uses a limo between them. His other home is in the country. He may never have even been on a city bus.
Speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised it its true.
Assuming (since I am not an expert on this) that the prioritisation of content is being done by some sort of prioritising of packets then it is a mutually exclusive situation. The line is only so fast - the line contains only so much bandwidth. If all providers pay to have their content prioritised then nothing moves any "faster" than it is with neutrality. If only one pays to have their content "faster" then all they are doing is degrading all other traffic.
ISP provisions need to be revolutionised - the current crop are perfectly happy as a hegemony of providers - do what they like, charge what they like. There is "competition" in only a very superficial sense.
What if Google stopped responding to requests from Virgin customers? I think Virgin would cave in pretty quickly.
I paid to invent and build that Internet that Virgin Media is now holding hostage for charging ransom against the billing model that made it worth holding for ransom. That's not a "free market", except in the corporate handouts you "Libertarians" love to pretend is "free" because you'd love to be the next ripoff artist yourself.
So I'm not "fighting WW2", a ridiculous comment from yet another Anonymous Libertarian Coward. I'm trying to keep some corporate interloper from ruining something that's too important to ignore. And as a trivial side skirmish, I'm slapping down your nonsense about a "free market" that erupts across an open Internet only because it does have equal access.
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I think he's referring to the publicly usable curb lane on streets that do NOT have reserved exclusive bus lanes, the ones which are soul destroying to be in, because the bus in front of you stops every block to pickup/dropoff people, and moves much slower than the lanes to the left which aren't plagued by busses constantly parking.
How do you think the cable companies got started? One cable at a time.
You left out one government granted monopoly to use the right of way at a tyme.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If you ditch net neutrality, each content provider has to negotiate contracts with every connectivity provider. So if there are N content providers and M ISPs, the system needs up to M*N contracts to function. That's a huge market inefficiency. Since ditching net neutrality doesn't magically create more bandwidth (it only prioritizes it), the system as a whole has gained zero additional capability at the cost of an enormous amount of extra paperwork. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, where each individual acting in their own best interests will result in the worst possible outcome for the system as a whole.
Also, the ISPs have yet to realized that this is a two-way street. If they start charging unaffiliated content providers extra money, the natural response is going to be content providers "unionizing" to increase their negotiating clout. Suddenly they'll be demanding lower network connectivity prices than they were initially charged. "You ISPs are getting money from other content providers, but haven't dropped your prices! We demand the prices you charge us reflect your new cost of operation."
The end result of all this will be a lot of running around to arrive at exactly where we started. It's stupid, wasteful, and inefficient. That's why net neutrality makes sense. If there's a bandwidth problem, the solution is to add more bandwidth; none of this stealing from the right hand to pay the left silliness.
The government builds and operates the interstate highway system for the common benefit of all. It's not much of a stretch to see the advantages of them building and operating a public data network, too.
As a bonus for the security-minded, if the government operated the public network, they wouldn't have to go cap-in-hand to the private sector for permission to monitor traffic. There are cameras on all the major highway intersections, and no one complains. The same could be done for a data network.
Governments aren't as cost-effective as private enterprise, but they have the terrific advantage of operating more in the public eye. For a public resource, this is an extremely valuable characteristic.
The fact is, telecom doesn't operate in a free market, so almost none of the normal arguments for letting private enterprise take the lead are valid. Competition doesn't truly exist, so corporations are free to invent ever more resourceful ways to make us pay more for less.
At the very least, a publicly-run network would be more responsive to ordinary users who at least have a vote. As it stands now, we really are at the telecomm's mercy.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Well, maybe in their imaginations. But that "libertarian" was hustling for exactly that kind of rigged market. Which is the only kind of market I've ever seen any "actual" libertarian hustle for in reality.
Maybe you're referring to some characters in an Ayn Rand novel. Those are all fiction.
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As soon as they get a semi-decent userbase, Tiscali will buy them. It's probably best for you to be quiet and keep the good ISP as your little secret.
The connections are in the posts to which I'm replying. They're not just "general attacks", they're counterattacks to what some libertarian has attacked me with.
:P.
One problem with libertarians is that you don't properly distinguish between the specific and the general. Like when you just capitalized "Libertarianism": that's the specific ideology of the Libertarian Party, not the general ideology of the political philosophy.
That tendency to conflation also underwrites the thinking in that entire post you just made. I never said "well, [l]ibertariams support the free market, and this happened in a free market, so, ummm DEATH TO LIBERTARIANS!" or anything close. In fact, I pointed out that the market in which Virgin's making its grab is not free, just the most obvious way in which your contrived "summary" is unconnected to reality. But it is a self-serving oversimplification, from a libertarian, so of course I should dignify it with the respect of a logical response
Libertarianism is political extremism, worshiping liberty while ignoring every other value, fetishizing a reductionist logic ad absurdum. I've had to deal with it for years, as generation after generation discovers Ayn Rand and "the virtue of selfishness" for itself, as if the world were brand new. There's as little chance of clear and reasoned debate about extremist libertarianism as there is about any other fundamentalism, as I've learned over and again for so long. No, it's much better to just laugh at it, because it's really better as a joke. Taking it seriously is just much too sad.
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