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BT Drops Phorm, Citing More Pressing Priorities
Tom DBA notes a story up at The Register that begins "BT has abandoned plans to roll out Phorm's controversial web monitoring and profiling system across its broadband network, claiming it needs to concentrate resources on network upgrades... BT's announcement comes a day before MPs and peers of the All Party Parliamentary Communications Group are due to begin an investigation of Internet privacy. Their intervention follows the EU's move to sue the UK government over its alleged failure... properly [to] implement European privacy laws with respect to the trials, drawing further bad publicity to the venture." We've discussed Phorm many times in the past.
How do we know Phorm didn't use deep packet inspection/manipulation to show us this article while in fact it's not there.....
Now I still have to find an appropriate Matrix quote and my tin foil hat.
"[Our decision has] nothing to do with cost or privacy, it's about resources and priority,"
This "focusing revenues" sounds a lot like an equation which didn't work out well for Phorm.
On one had is the money they "could" make by introducing it by adverts, on the other is the potential number of existing customers who will jump to another ISP added to the number of potential customers not even looking at BT as an option when switching from their ISP. Their current subscribers direct debits are guaranteed income with most subscribers not bothering to look around. Not to mention dealing with Phorm gives you the badge of a pariah.
They could be right, in that it's more profitable to drop Phorm. That said, I'm not sure they dropped it permanently. They seem to have bought into the DPI advert injection model, so no doubt they will only put it into the "let's get back to that after the broohaha has calmed down" box before being reintroduced a couple of years from now under a different name with lessons learned about "how not to get caught". They may still face further legal / political fallout over what they've done to date with Phorm, so dropping Phorm may help mitigate any sanctions.
For those who are currently with BT and have reconsidered moving away after this announcement I say "watch this space, BT have proven themselves perfectly willing to fuck their customers over once, they will do it again". BT think they have done no wrong. They can't be trusted. They avoided police action in the UK, they may yet avoid other punishment, but consumers CAN punish them.
Moreover, BT the (global) telecommunications company has used this brand long before BitTorrent existed. Might I suggest he stops calling BitTorrent BT to avoid himself getting confussed?
Also, AT&T don't call themselves American Telephone & Telegraph Company in all their advertising literature and billing, do they? Perhaps for the hell of it he could stop referring to them as AT&T because he might also easily confuse their name with AT&T.
Alternatively, he could just use wikipedia's disambiguation before posting silly requests.