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UK's Two Biggest ISPs Rip Up Net Neutrality
Barence writes "The UK's two biggest ISPs have openly admitted they'd give priority to certain internet apps or services if companies paid them to do so. Speaking at a Westminster eForum on net neutrality, senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals. Asked specifically if TalkTalk would afford more bandwidth to YouTube than the BBC's iPlayer if Google was prepared to pay, the company's executive director of strategy and regulation, Andrew Heaney, argued it would be 'perfectly normal business practice to discriminate between them.' Meanwhile, BT's Simon Milner said: 'We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts,' although he added BT had never received such an approach."
You know, not every bit of software is an app...I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous. You would think someone in such a position within a tech-centered company would know this (actually, on second thought...)
Living With a Nerd
At least they're upfront and honest about this. No weasel words, no political doublespeak, just a flat out, "Yep, bigger payoffs, bigger pipes."
As a business whose sole existence is to make money and pay their shareholders, is anyone surprised at this? Hell, does any reasonable person expect otherwise? It makes perfect business sense to prioritize websites that pay you. This is why people should not expect businesses to promote net neutrality.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The UK's two biggest ISPs have openly admitted they'd give priority to certain internet apps or services if companies paid them to do so
This is what Google does too. A business pays cash to get a chance at being displayed on Google's first page of search results. And nobody raises a finger...right?
The pipes are still the same size. They don't say that they're going to use the money to buy more bandwidth overall.
What they're saying is that if Company A pays them, they'll make sure that Company B's users get less of the available bandwidth.
If the size of the pipe doesn't change, in order to "prioritize" something, you have to "de-prioritize" something else.
You know, not every bit of software is an app...I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous. You would think someone in such a position within a tech-centered company would know this (actually, on second thought...)
I suspect what he means is companies providing web-based SaaS solutions may wish to pay so that data relating to their service is prioritised, making their product faster.
And then they could accept payment to block certain "apps" or a least slow them down to crawl.
If the shoe fits, it's ugly.
As the owner of a backbone, router, dns, other service, frequented by many of your customers...
Some random guy who hates you paid me to redirect all your customers traffic to tubgirl.
Still think it's a good idea? If money is all it takes to change service and quality for anyone... The net's gonna be stupid and unusable by everyone. Including your own customers.
If I want my service to be fast just about anywhere on the web, I guess I'll need to make this kind of deal with >9000 ISPs?
I guess I should do that as an individual as well, I'll pay so that all the traffic with my IP goes on the fast lane to the detriment of other customers in my area.
I can see the company's point. Why improve on the infrastructure of the network when you can get customers to pay an extra to get a better share of the limited connectivity?
ISP's have long held this rather far fetched belief that both consumers and content providers should be paying to shift data between the two, I'm sure as soon as ISP's got 1 or 2 big players (youtube , facebook etc) they would use it as an excuse to shitlist any non-premium traffic to the extent that you either paid up, or stooped delivering content to that particular ISP's customers and said ISP would throw up it's hands and say "it's not our problem, facebook and youtube are using all our bandwidth and they have paid for priority"
I can see this being an especially attractive prospect considering the looming need for extensive network upgrades as people start to actually make use of their 10+ meg "unlimited" connections for HD content delivery, why upgrade your capacity when you can sell the same bandwidth twice and cut out anyone who's not prepared to pay.
Virgin media has already said it takes a dim view on net neutrality, and most other ISP's are beholden to BT to a greater or lesser extent, truely it is a dark day for British broadband.
Defined as: (n) application, application program, applications programme (a program that gives a computer instructions that provide the user with tools to accomplish a task) "he has tried several different word processing applications"
If the customer cares about Bandwidth to a particular service that is discriminated against, then given the availability of competition the customer will move on. Heck, maybe a particular customer agrees with the discriminatory choices -- in this way, it is a gain and a feature for him. The issue for me is not with network neutrality, it's if companies don't tell you up-front about their practices, and if government allows no competition in the space.
If this ISP hosted the data, sure, that has always been the case, but if this ISP is saying that any data that passes over their wires can get prioritization by paying more, fuck you buddy
somebody made the extremely astute comment that to do the kind of thing they are saying they want to do, the ISP would have to slow down everyone else. because there is simply no such thing as speeding up only one website selectively, there is only artificially slowing everyone down (except for those who pay up). this isn't capitalism, this is monopolistic blackmail
everything on a network as TCP/IP currently works is being delivered according to factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with financial input. yes, you can use financial input to build network infrastructure or build more servers, but on an existing pipe, to make financial input a factor, you would need to do artificial things that would add to overhead and cost. you would have to
1. proactively examine the headers,
2. pick out the headers from companies that are paying you,
3. proactively block all other headers
ironically, the effort involved to do this proactive promotion of certain headers is an additional cost on the speed of your network
so in other words, in a world where traffic priority is determined by who pays up, you are artificially hobbling the entire network for the sake of who gets priority in order to make the scheme work, and furthermore, the sheer effort of prioritizing headers hobbles your network even further
its silly
if i were a company and i wanted my traffic to get to internet consumers faster than my competitors, i wouldn't pay the isp to do that. i'd simply build more servers and place them at more nodes. much bigger bang for your buck, and you aren't buying into a bullshit system that creates an artificial rigged marketplace by ruining the elegance of how the internet works best
in the real world, all these ISPs are doing is giving their ISP competitors a selling point: "we're faster, because we don't interfere". the ISPs would have collude against the consumer and the content providers to impose an artificial tax on the internet, that would also slow it down
monopolistic and oligopolistic anti-capitalist schemes are alive and well. we learned nothing from the gilded age of victorian times. bust the assholes up and sue them into oblivion if any of them tries this crap
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is like classic mafia-style "oops insurance". They aren't speeding anything up. It's basically saying "pay us more or your traffic will be slowed down".
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
I don't think we'd see Google or other companies paying for their websites to be any faster... they're already pretty much as fast as they're going to get. What would be nice (or the end of the world depending on who you ask) is if users could pay to give their data priority. Think about it, no more lag spikes in the middle of the video game and likely (in theory) cheaper internet access for the people out there that just want email or whatever. And truthfully I already have to pay my ISP more if I want more bandwith (and I do) so where's the harm for paying for faster data too?
"We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts,"
What's that got to do with it? I could absolutely see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay Assassins to kill their competition. That shouldn't be legal either.
And I'm bloody outraged!
One of the purposes of the water/gas/internet providers is to, sure, earn a buck and get paid for their time. I get that. But another reason for their existence is to get me my effin water, gas, or internet. If they failed to do that or the quality was really piss poor, for whatever reason, there would be outrage. I And on a deeper, non-personal level, they are destroying the internet. I'm not one to really cozy up to tradition, and I'm aware that all is transient and change in inevitable, but I'm kind of a fan of this Internet thing. It's one of the very few things that I feel really strongly about, and I'll defend it the best that I can.
How exactly do you get "service above best efforts"? Isn't "best" the maximum by definition?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
How much would it cost to have an ISP degrade the performance of a competitor's web site to where it is almost unusable? Not much different than this really.
You expected any different?
Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
So they sell "priority" to Company A ... but Company A's packets go through with the exact same speed as Company B's packets.
UNDER IDEAL CIRCUMSTANCES THAT IS.
The only way for an ISP to make a profit is to over-sell their bandwidth. If the ISP is profitable, their lines WILL be saturated.
Yet another thing these greedy corporate douchbags can ruin for a quick profit.
So if your priority clients gets to the front of the line for every packet on this over allocated network, then your unpaying sites are going to start timing out. They are defeated. And then the ISP is going to start lying. The ISP is going to claim that there must be something wrong with the "unpaying site" because otherwise they would have to admit that they shoved the money in their pockets instead of buying more bandwidth.
If they're saying they are willing to do it, bet your bottom dollar they have already done it or are already doing it. And, if they're being public about it, then they want those with the big chequebooks to open their wallets.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts."
What's better than best? Or are they acknowledging that they don't really make a best-effort at present?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
This was so obvious, I'm sure even the famous british bookers didn't take any bets on it.
Of course a for-profit ISP will gladly take money to slow down the opposition (there's no such thing as speeding up "selected services" if you assume that they are currently delivering packets as quickly as they can). Who would not love a business model that consists of being the middle man in an exchange where you get money from both sides?
However, most of us here know enough about networking that we realize that no matter what any kind of "priorisation" will come at the expense of everyone else. Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
As someone else pointed out last time we had the topic, "let the market sort it out" is (once again) not a valid solution. You can switch your ISP, but you can't choose what route your packets travel and you have no choice in the backbone providers it may travel through. So there simply is no way to vote with your dollars/euros.
We need a law. One that says in no uncertain terms that network neutrality is the law and if you violate it as an ISP you lose your license to operate. Any less and they will tell their lawyers to go find the loopholes.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's not "someone" getting poorer performance, it's everyone who didn't pay. The bottom of the slippery slope is that if you don't pay the extortion money, your packets don't get through at all.
The ISPs say they've never been approached by a content provider with a request to pay for priority transmission... Presumably the content providers have thought about it. Maybe it's just not worth spending the money on?
These chumps brag about having the fastest broadband in the whole universe and openly try and mock other ISPs .. yet when I was with them my line broadband maxed out at 6.5mb, and they still think that is the best I can get yet with my current ISP I get 10mb+ !! They are full of it and I hope the company crashes and burns after reading this BS coming from there collar mouths.
YEA great way to do business
i can see the hotdog guy with a picture of the hotdog ALL YUMMY
and its a foot long, and what you get is 4 inches and cold NO condiments and you think you will do business with him again?
Switching ISPs is easily done as long as your kept informed with changes that could affect services but do it underhand and I'll start asking the price of your 12oz Soda
"although he added BT had never received such an approach."
Maybe the few companies interested in doing so though they would be told to get lost and didn't want to risk having their name found out for making the request if they got nothing out of said request. I can't be the only one who sees this statement from the ISPs as an invitation for providers to start making offers for priority over their competitors.
I'm pretty sure BT do this already.
They throttle their competitors, like Youtube, but they do not throttle their own services or people that they collaborate with.
"There's no reason for society to allow you to bloviate on the Internet, either, yet we allow it. And I'm completely serious - what do we, the "Society Hive" you seem to value so highly, gain by allowing half the shit we do?"
it's called free will. yes, there is no money to be made off of it. this offends you, and a number of other people, who don't believe in capitalism. you believe in turning everything into a marketplace. for what purpose? for making cash. not because it is right, nor if it wrong, but just because in your value system, the only thing that matters is that someone somewhere is making money off of it. that's the only thing that matters, against which all other meaning is judged
you are what is called a free market fundamentalist. this is the basis of your belief system. if you were trying to sell bottled water in front of a crystal clear lake, you'd poison the lake. if you were trying to sell canisters of air, you'd pollute the atmosphere
where there is no scarcity (the only REAL WORLD foundation for a marketplace) you will create a false scarcity
the internet, such as with media distributors, has turned what was a scarcity with cost into a zero cost ubiquity. their entire foundation for thought has been shaken. they don't know how to deal with it. they honestly believe that the economics of scarcity should and forever more apply to their business, and if technology has changed and destroyed their marketplace by removing the scarcity, well by golly, they'll enforce an artificial one
that way is the way of destruction and enslavement. and i'm sorry sir, but you who wish to monetize everything will not prevail, as long as there is a shred of decency and humanity in this world
some things are free, not because i said so, but because they are not scarce. this is not about power, this is about the reality and the definition of a natural marketplace. something is not a marketplace because someone on a throne or with a gun said so, but because people want something that has a cost involved. if there is no cost, THERE IS NO MARKET. you don't make something scarce just because you wish to make a buck
so go study your economics 101, reacquaint yourself with your conscience, and fuck off, asshole
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If they'd accept money to favor one site's traffic over a competitor, would they also accept money to outright block traffic to the competitor?
additionally, i quoted him where he never mentioned libertarianism, and i reacted to that
so... what is your problem again?
oh and fuck that putz noam chomsky
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I dont know what the landscape is like over there but if my ISP here in Australia tried a stunt like this, I would have no hesitation venting my spleen (both in public and to the company) and then changing to another ISP.
If enough people stand up to ISPs that want to pull these tricks, ISPs will stop doing it.
Any ISP that doesnt listen to its customers is not an ISP you should be supporting anyway (too many companies in this modern world have adopted a "screw the customer, its all about the money" mentality. GOOD companies realize that the way to make more money is to keep the customers happy so they remain customers)
Pay to play. Want us to play your records on the radio? PAY US! Here, we have people who are making money selling bandwidth, except that you only get a limited amount of some kind of bandwidth (what no one is paying extra for) and you get lots of bandwidth because someone wants you to have more. Come on. Its no worse than a doctor prescribing drugs for you that the pharmaceutical company paid the doctor to give you. Sure they aren't really well tested and you may die, but if you don't, you might get hooked and spend your life savings buying more. Sure some schmuck paid for the bandwidth, but that doesn't mean that it can be purchased twice and controlled. I could even see bidding wars over who gets final control. Its good to be the ISP.
There is clearly a conflict of interest here. Two groups of people are paying these companies.
Their customers are paying for net access and don't want someone else getting more bandwidth than they are because of their choice of websites / software.
But then others come along and say we'll pay you to prioritise our traffic.
These ISPs should decide who their customers are.
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
This would never work.
Do you think Gradma who uses the internets for facebook, youtube and emailing her cookery classmates cares about this?
Do you think anyone except nerds will care about this?
And do you honestly believe that if ISPS want to dress this up nicely "Now with 50% more speed on facebook!" - that your voice is going to be heard ?
This of course is assuming that this change happens at the endpoints, and not at the infrastructure level - which wil give you no choice whatsoever.
Anyone care to tell me what happens when one ISP which my packets pass thru has one "prioritizing" scheme, and others have different "prioritizing" schemes ?
Yep, only a trickle will flow, if at all ...
Ofcourse, no single ISP will be to blame for that (they will all point to "the others" as the culprit, therefore claiming that their customers can't sue them), but the end-effect will be the same : no service for any customer wanting to connect outside of the area his ISP has got deals with.
Funny that Simon Milner said "BT had never received such an approach", when they have a service called Wholesale Content Connect which is pretty much a hosted CDN from BT.
and you are against free expression
fuck you you twatstain
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
at stake, that says to me that you are not quite bright and/ or not very perceptive
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hiya.
Oh-yeah they want to trash "common carrier" status so that they can play the whole suite of nasty business tricks. But they'll find a way to whine about "not being responsible" or something that normally comes as part of being common. I like to call these kinds of ploys "division by zero style tactics". In other words, if you allow a formal logic error in your argument, after it's dressed up you can pseudo-prove anything.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine