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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
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?
Except that they're completely different services. The only real thing they have in common is that both have something to do with the Internet.
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.
Karnal
That's how you make something's price go up. You make sure it remains scarce.
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
"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.
How much are you willing to pay them? There's your answer.
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.
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.
"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.
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....
Having actually been in charge of bandwidth allocation for an ISP I can tell you that no sites for any company have an unlimited fat pipe of bandwidth at their disposal. Even the big boys buy from someone else, and what they buy is closely regulated based on current usage and future potential over a pre-determined period of time (factoring in local growth and competition). The price of bandwidth changes based on the location of the demarc and the quantity purchased, so the higher your population density the more bandwidth you need, but you can buy it cheaper because you can spread that price across more people. Saturation levels of 90% or more are regular during peak hours (6pm-2am) for an ISP (at least one that doesn't lose customers hand over fist) because they run as cheap as possible for as long as possible in order to please management and see better profit numbers. Even when saturation hits 100% you still won't normally 'time out' of anything unless there are very serious issues, but you will likely see higher latency times (which you likely do see regularly during these hours anyway because of saturation). Prioritization of data will cause latency for other things to become higher, sites will seem slower, and it is wrong to do that to customers. If you were right and there was no limit to bandwidth then it wouldn't be wrong at all to use QoS-for-pay (QfP?) but that is definitely not the case. Companies purposely create a scarcity from the top down when it comes to bandwidth in order to give it an artificial value which is then passed on to big ISPs, then to medium ISPs, then to small ones and then to us. The price just gets bigger the farther down the food chain you go.
"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
I think it's all theoretical.
OFCOM said some time ago that ISPs are free to prioritise protocols and such, but if they go so far as giving one company priority over another, they'll step in. They can deprioritise BitTorrent for example, but if they deprioritised BitTorrent for World of Warcraft's updates in favour of some theoretical competitor then they'd fall foul of what OFCOM has declared legitimate for them to do.
I'm not sure the BT execs saying this really know what they're saying, because it puts them in breach of OFCOM's viewpoint on the issue which could see them stuck in an expensive face-off against the industry regulator and I doubt they'd knowingly do that. I think they're just stating what they'd like to do if the opportunity arose, not what they actually do or are actually able to do for the above mentioned reason- it'd get them in shit, unless OFCOM has changed it's stance, but I do not believe it has.