Slashdot Mirror
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."
The end state of this is considerably worse than what we have now, and in exchange for it we get no benefits. There is no reason for society to allow it.
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?
Because god damn if browsing another silly YouTube video gets a little slow or it takes me 1/5 of a second longer to post some inane bullshit on Facebook! We, society, should control private property over such important issues as this!
Pfft. I'll tell you what, as a part of "society" I'll vote to force them to prioritize emergency data. Other than that, it's unimportant and certainly not worthy of gunpoint coercion.
I'm not a nutty big-L Libertarian who thinks the government should do nothing, but Jesus Christ, I'm also not for needless meddling in cases where the free market _does_ work and where even if it doesn't it's not that important anyway.
You'd think we were all dying in the fucking streets 30 years ago before the Internet proliferated. Some of you people are like a bunch of god damn addicts.
First, oooooh, browsing porn or the hilarious video of the day of some guy flipping over the top of his bike is big, important stuff! We better blather on about destruction and enslavement.
Second, what the fuck are you on about? Are you convinced that bandwidth is free?
Third, I'm not a free market fundamentalist at all. I just remember when we fought to keep the government _out_ of the business of controlling the internet and now jackholes like you are all laughably righteous about a bullshit issue and think the Freedom of Mankind (properly capitalized to convey the drama you imply) is at stake if we don't (!) have the government go in and run the ISPs.
I care about fairness, property laws (tempered by the caveat that society protects your property rights so has some rights to build laws around them), and the principle of least interference.
If there was anything important at stake, I'd give a shit about net neutrality. But there simply isn't, it's just chicken littleism.