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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.'"
...he's already doing deals to deliver some people's content faster than others... IANAL, so does anybody know if these kinds of deals might have the effect of invalidating an ISP's 'common carrier' protections?If so, I vote we prosecute him for downloading child porn, as a modern-day equivalent of walking the plank, and a warning to the other ISPs...
Yarrrrr!
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
In one way it is refreshing to hear a CEO describe in truth what is going on whether one agrees with him/her or not. Usually a CEO stands behind innuendos and words with double meanings to avoid a head on collision. Not so with this one apparently.
It happens that I believe that all should have equal access but then I do not run an ISP. It seems clear that multiple levels of service can be commanded by varying levels of payments. Sort of like steak or hamburger.
It will be interesting to see how all of this finally works out.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
I don't know about other people, but it angers me greatly that an ISP that has already been paid by me for the bandwidth I use, gets to turn around and extort money from the providers that I access. Overselling bandwidth and net neutrality are two separate issues. I can deal with the overselling of bandwidth for longer, because overall it doesn't limit the amount of content available to me, it just makes me wait a little longer. Allowing ISP's to charge providers for a transaction that has essentially already been paid for is dangerous and downright wrong. It's not unthinkable that this could lead to payment disputes between companies where some major providers are only available on certain networks, in fact it's probable that this is the end result.
Make no mistake, what this guy is talking about makes me very angry.
I got a catholic block.
Just FYI - whilst Virgin have the cable market in the UK sewn up, we're lucky enough to not have a situation whereby ISPs are limited to any particular area.
Of course - the only other alternative for digital TV would be freeview (limited channels) or Rupert Murdoch's Sky.
However, if enough people got wind of this, it would be possible to give Virgin a bit of a kicking financially.
I was cynical enough to believe that myself, that "Net Neutrality" would die an obscure inside baseball battle in which telcos easily rolled over a few geeks with a sense of history, economics and fair play. But then it turned out to be surprisingly popular and accessible to the public at large. I don't know how it happened, but it did.
It doesn't hurt to underestimate the public's attention span and insight into its self-interest, because it's usually absent, especially in the face of distracting entertainment. Unless by underestimating you ignore when it's available as a powerful ally. In Net Neutrality, this has somehow turned out to be the case. Let's not pass it up.
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make install -not war
In all seriousness though, I would love to see Google sneak in a special version of their adwords. Every time a Virgin ISP user is served a Google ad, make sure one says:
Attention Virgin Media Customer
Your ISP is slowing your connection down to extort money out of you! Click here for more information!
This coming from Virgin, a brand whose business model and valuation depends entirely on its coolness factor... I am speechless...
Napoleon used to say: "I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets."
I hesitate between thanking this guy to state openly what the other ISP's have worked hard to disguise and warning him to watch the speed at which his brand will disintegrate...
Because, indeed, as the parent implies, Virgin's scheme means the end of the Internet as we know it, and we are really, really, not going to be happy about it...
It's only faster until they decide to shake down your favorite site or service. Then you might as well have dial up.
Their brazen admission of these practices is not better than alleged shameful practices. Both are wrong and both lead to the same place if the other companies are determined to rip everyone off. The practice can't be hidden for long, so what you have is a choice between ignorant leadership that may be evil or plain evil. Both suck.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I see this as one area where Google, MS and Yahoo can show some real leadership. Don't hand over any extra money, and if the customer's ISP is a known throttler, then place a message at the top of each page stating "The page you have requested is being slowed down by your internet provider. Click here to find out why and what you can do about it". If the three biggest websites and their other websites (remember that Google owns YouTube and Yahoo owns Flickr) all put this message on, the backlash against the ISP would be way too big. Remember that speed is relative, especially when downloading webpages. Telling the user to expect the pages slower then usual will give the user the impression it is, even if the ISP hasn't yet started throttling.
If I was some content provider like a youtube knock off or something and I got some bullshit shakedown letter asking for money or they'll limit the download speed at my site, I'd note the ISP sending it and put a blatent note on every video playing page that said "If _____ is your ISP, they're purposely slowing down video streaming on this site. To view videos at full speed, switch to another ISP." That would really burn their ass. You get enough of those messages around the internet on high traffic sites and everyone will get a really bad image of that ISP really fast and switch like crazy. That would be the end of that crap and it would force net nuetrality faster than any law would.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
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echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I find it quite interesting that these "free countries" seem to have such an issue with getting it through their skulls when it comes to net neutrality.
I live in Japan, which is a democracy and supposedly "free" country, but with many restrictions and bureaucracy that make it feel less than so. However, net connections have always been better than advertised.
First example is "best effort maximum speeds". Back in the day of 64Kbps and 128Kbps ISDN, there was a worry that everyone online, all at once, would cause a bottle neck. So the advertising said that the cheap plans were "best effort" speeds, and your mileage may vary. They said the same with ADSL, and then fiber. However, "best effort" really did mean the telco and provider's "best effort", and I have yet had a line that was slower than what you would expect from real world overhead issues with routers and your TCP/IP implementation simply being poor. With 100Mbps fiber, I really got 64Mbps throughput, up and down. That really isn't bad.
Then there's the "unlimited access" thing. When they say unlimited, they mean it over here. I have never, ever heard of a case where a provider cracked down on a user because they were going over some invisible threshold. Actually, I've heard the opposite from a Telco/ISP employee who was talking off the record. He said that the fiber lines typically run into a 1Gbps line via a router that houses anywhere from 20 to 50 users. However, these routers are monitored, and if throughput drops too much, they'll investigate who's hoarding. The solution is... move the hoarder off to a different router that has less traffic so that everyone is satisfied.
And finally, there's the net neutrality issue. I have not done serious research into this over here, but I have never heard of taking your line for ransom. I haven't even heard of bandwidth throttling for that matter, and while they MAY do it, they're pretty darn good at not letting it get spotted. None of my traffic has ever felt oddly slow compared to anything else.
Some argue that it's because Japan has such a centralized population, so getting a network out isn't as hard. While there is a small bit of truth to that, I must also add that I now live way out in the boonies called Hokkaido, in a small town, and while I don't have ISDN yet, I do have ADSL. 50Mbps down, 10Mbps or so up. That's not bad at all by any standard. (OK, OK, the grandma in Sweden will kick my bandwith's butt, but it's still faster than most U.S. lines.)
The service was great while my ISP was Blueyonder, but then the "Bearded Demon" (Richard Branson) and his hooded Virgin Media hordes took them over. Now I can't download a single TV program from ITunes without being throttled into oblivion. What's the point of broadband when you just get throttled when you use it?
I think we have Comcast & BitTorrent to thank for that. Using torrents to download music/movies/etc. is apparently far more mainstream than we thought. So when Comcast started interfering with torrent traffic, and said interference started getting media attention, people got pissed and wanted something done about it.
The real questions are will they stay pissed long enough for something to get done, and will they manage to not get mislead by some of the slimeballs wanting to destroy the Internet as we know it.
Could be. Though I think that Americans just were easily able to simplify "Net Neutrality" into "still getting my stuff for free", when it's so obvious that the telcos and cablecos will just rip us off at any chance. All it took was for geeks to say that those Net barons were up to that, and Americans could easily see it would go down like that. They might even have clued into the sudden diversity of news stories on the Net, and refuse to go back to just the TV news echo chamber.
The cat is out of the bag. It's going to cost the telcos and cablecos a lot more than they expected to put it back in there.
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make install -not war
Bus Lanes in the UK are generally regarded (whether its true or not) to be useless or greatly underused (Top Gear once set up a camera on a motorway bus station for the duration of the hour long program at peak times, and did not see a single bus). Therefore - the use of bus lane as negative with respect to speed. At least, when I read it, I immediatly understood it as a bad thing. From UK if you haven't already guessed.
I ask because this is the second time in as many days I've heard someone say this so I'm intrigued to know why and where people are hearing this from?
DSL ZoneIf you look at sites like this:
ISP Reviewor this:
They're fairly consistently rated as almost worst ISP there is.
I'm wondering if Virgin have run some kind of successful whisper campaign to hide the truth about their service?
Or the Sky whose flagship channel, Sky One, is no longer available on Virgin?
Ever since Telewest and NTL merged they've been going merrily to Hell. As far as I can gather, they've done an HP/Compaq - taken the worst aspects of each company and thrown away the best.
Truth is, the debate over net neutrality has glossed over the fact that we never really had it. You pay to play and for cost, FIOS>cable>dsl>dialup. How fast do you want your data? Pay up. Netzero offered free dialup for years.
We need to stop ranting and instead start discussing ways to protect freedom of information and privacy. ISP's have a very real problem in that bandwidth is not free and a small percentage of users do in fact use the majority of bandwidth. The real problem is more about truth in advertising. We share bandwidth and the routers can only handle so much traffic.
A simple scheme like throttling my connection by default while allowing me to temporarily increase it for large downloads would be fine. I don't want my downloads constantly slowed to a crawl because of my neighbors addiction to hi rez video porn. I could get my linux ISO's quickly while he would just have to wait for his constant bittorrent of flesh.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.