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

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

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: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.