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?

[IndustrialComplex]

There's no written rule saying it can't be used to describe all software, but it pisses me off in the same way it pisses me off when someone says "put it on the floor" when they're standing in the middle of a forest, or call a truck a "car"

You must be angry a significant portion of the time if trivial things like that set you off. You are using the English language, it's a very flexibile language that allows for a wide variety of 'errors' while still conveying the intended message.

Restated:

You must be fuming a bunch if you make mountains out of molehills. English puts up with a lot of meddling. It can be bungled up and still convey the same meaning.

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.

My website has 9000 partners!

[Dalzhim]

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?

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.

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:the last time this issue came up here

[vadim_t]

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".

Dropping packets without thinking much is easy. You can limit the buffer and drop anything that won't fit, or do something like RED. You can do this without looking at the packet itself.

Dropping packets by customer requires examining the packet in detail, and deciding which priority it should have. This costs more effort, which means you need more CPU power to handle it.

There's no reason not to charge to allow someone to move to the front of the line.

The first company who pays will be happy, it will have noticeably better performance.

The second probably as well.

By the 200th or so, there will be so many "priority" customers that the situation will be effectively the same it was before, except they will be paying for that privilege of having any traffic delivered at all. If the link is so busy that priority traffic can take all of it, and it's indeed priority traffic, then everything else is going to get slowed down to a crawl if it gets delivered at all. And guess what, if you have a small website, or work at a small company, that's where your traffic will end up: at the very bottom of the pile.

Think they'll upgrade the pipe? But why would they? There must be congestion for a priority scheme to make sense.

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.

We absolutely could see a situation when

[Culture20]

"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.

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.

this is why we need a law

[Tom]

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.

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....

Re:Not exactly.

[rezalas]

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.