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."

Comments

What's with this app horsedookie?

[Pojut]

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...)

Re:What's with this app horsedookie?

[MoonBuggy]

Isn't it just short for application?

Re:What's with this app horsedookie?

[Que914]

I don't think that such is accidental, it's marketing. As we all know, there are legitimate reasons to shape traffic, i.e. VOIP is far more sensitive to latency that FTP. By calling everything an application they're hoping to confuse the legitimate traffic shaping described above with the crap that they're describing here. Technocrats aren't likely to fall for it but it will be very useful in confusing those with a vague understanding of the issues.

Re:What's with this app horsedookie?

[nine-times]

Yes, and it's been used as a short form of "application" for decades. The fact that Apple has made use of the term has gotten some people to use it conventionally to mean iPhone applications specifically, but I remember people using it to mean "application" long before (e.g. people talking about having a "killer app").

Re:What's with this app horsedookie?

[gorzek]

Indeed. The phrase "killer app" was used before the notion of smartphones was a glimmer in anyone's eye. From where I'm standing, "app" is just an abbreviation of "application," and it need not even be a software program. Social networking is an "app," in terms of being an application of Web-based technologies to provide useful services, despite not being a program in any strict sense.

I really hate what Apple does to language sometimes.

Re:What's with this app horsedookie?

[MeatBag PussRocket]

The problem is that half of your grievances are a result of you being a tech-hipster. LCD's *are* in fact flat screens. DVD's *are* Compact Discs, granted they are a specific type of disc, and Hard Disk space *is* memory, its not RAM, but it is memory.

look, i understand these are pet peeves because they dont conform to the vernacular you're used to, but being frustrated about the way people say things when they're technically accurate... well thats a sign of deeper issues.

Credit where credit is due

[Volante3192]

At least they're upfront and honest about this. No weasel words, no political doublespeak, just a flat out, "Yep, bigger payoffs, bigger pipes."

And?

[Nidi62]

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.

Re:And?

[nine-times]

I hate this sort of argument. There are people who constantly use this excuse for every shitty thing that any company does, and it fails to take a few things into account.

First, it's not clear that a business's sole purpose is to make money for shareholders. Businesses and corporations are artifices that society has created for the purpose to increasing productivity and fairness and economic growth for the sake of benefiting society as a whole, i.e. "the common good". We have laws that limit an officer of the corporation from acting against the shareholder's interests, but those are largely in existence to prevent fraud. They are not there to prevent businesses from acting out of moral/ethical responsibility.

Second, your argument assumes (to some degree) that acting to please their customers and to cooperate with their partners and competitors would not be in the company's best interest. That's not a very clear issue. Certainly going against the best interests of your customers is dangerous over the long term, and the Internet is built in a way that assumes that many people are cooperating in good faith.

So no, I'm not surprised that someone might choose to do this, but that doesn't make it appropriate, ethical, or wise.

Re:And?

[Dutchmaan]

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.

And the precise reason it needs to be regulated.

Re:Not exactly.

[karnal]

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.

No, that's not what they're saying. What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.

Re:Not exactly.

[Dalzhim]

That's how you make something's price go up. You make sure it remains scarce.

Transparency and Competition

[m6ack]

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.

hosted maybe

[bhcompy]

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

the last time this issue came up here

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:the last time this issue came up here

[RightSaidFred99]

Facile BS. Bandwidth is over-allocated, and at some point you need to decide "which packet goes through first, I've got 10 in line". There's no reason not to charge to allow someone to move to the front of the line.

Re:the last time this issue came up here

[DragonWriter]

this isn't capitalism, this is monopolistic blackmail

Capitalism tends to monopolistic blackmail, which is why intelligent advocates of economic systems organized for the common good as far back as Adam Smith have argued against allowing economic policy to disproportionately favor the interests of the capital-holding/mercantile class.

Oddly enough, the word "capitalism", originating in the 19th Century and popularized by Marxist writers using it as a label for the 19th Century system in advanced industrial countries that they advocated needed to be replaced is often used in a rather equivocal way to refer to that system, the economic system of modern advanced countries, and the economic systems advocated by classical economic theorists like Smith, as if those all were the same, or even similar, systems; however, its obvious to any sensible observer that those systems are completely different -- the 19th Century system to which the name "capitalism" was first attached was driven by policies of the precise types Smith warned against, and the modern economies sometimes labelled "capitalist" are, virtually without exception, systems which have thrived precisely because they adopted many of the proposals that 19th Century critics of capitalism demanded in the Communist Manifesto.

monopolistic and oligopolistic anti-capitalist schemes are alive and well. we learned nothing from the gilded age of victorian times

The "monopolistic and oligopolistc" schemes of Victorian times are the heart of the system the word "capitalism" was first widely used to describe, and they very much serve the interests of the capitalist class. They are not, in any reasonable sense, "anti-capitalist".

Re:Not exactly.

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

How much are you willing to pay them? There's your answer.

Not as bad as in the US

[AndyS]

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.

Re:Not exactly.

[zeroshade]

They are saying nothing of hurting those that don't pay.

It's simple network management. If you prioritize one source of packets and the network reaches a saturation point, the mere fact that you've prioritized one means you have to de-prioritize others. There's limited resources, if you always send Company A's packets before you send Company B's, then Company B will have degraded service.

Also, TFA said so:

... 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.

Hmm, I wonder what 'expense of their rivals' means....

at least you are consistent

[circletimessquare]

"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