UK Minister Backs 'Two-Speed' Internet

Darkon writes "UK Culture minister Ed Vaizey has backed a 'two-speed internet', letting service providers charge content makers and customers for 'fast lane' access. It paves the way for an end to 'net neutrality' — with heavy bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use."

Comments

Open Rights Group Have Responded

[MHDK]

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/open-internet-enhances-our-freedom-of-speech/

Re:Newspeak

[FredFredrickson]

I know, right? Google already pays for the pipes they use.

dangburn newfangled hippies

[arkane1234]

I can hear it now, almost a throwback to the 60's...
"dangburn newfangled hippies with their free love, free net, free information! Every redblooded {American|Brit} knows you get what you pay for! Can't have vagrants just lolligagging around on the net! The pricetag filters out the hoodlums!"

Confused.

[Usefull Idiot]

Google and the BBC already pay for the "pipes" they use, and end users pay for the "pipes" they use, where is someone not getting paid in this?

Re:Confused.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the poor ISPs are only getting paid by everyone involved once.

Re:Confused.

[rakuen]

Well, I'm certainly not getting paid to put up with these shenanigans.

To be a little more serious though, ISPs have it in their head that they can get more money if they come up with a scheme to double-bill people or corporate entities. They're looking to governments to allow it, and it looks like someone high up in the UK wants to support it. Once in effect, they can make even more money that they can continue to not spend on improvements.

Re:Confused.

[_Sprocket_]

It has come to the good Minister's attention, via very earnest talks with telecom industry representatives, that the Internet is not a lorry. You just don't dump a movie on to the Internet without it getting mixed up with everyone's emails. And in fact, unlike when you mail a DVD, a movie on the Internet is not a single package. A movie can be many hundreds of thousands of packages. In fact, with the help of a very complex Powerpoint slide, the Honourable Minister was able to understand that merely even beginning to send a movie on the Internet requires a "three way handshake" which is, in effect, three whole messages being sent back and forth on the Internet. Meanwhile, the poor, near impoverished telecoms have been fooled in to under-charging by at least 1/3 of what they should be owed. They have attempted to make this up by charging the service provider and the user but that is only 2 of the fair 3 charges owed; and that's just this handshake. It doesn't even take account all the other packets involved. Clearly someone has made a mistake and it will take government to step in and rectify the situation. To further educate the Honourable Minister, the British Phonographic Industry attended the presentation and noted that the thousands of packets noted by the telecom industry each represents a lost sale and is largely the cause of the Spice Girls entering retirement.

Re:Confused.

[MightyMartian]

Imagine if Google started shaping outgoing traffic based on incoming address. Boy oh boy, would we hear the gnashing of teeth and angry demands and accusations of monopolistic practices.

Without the content, there would be no reason for consumers to buy Internet service at all.

Re:Confused.

[Schadrach]

Your ISP isn't getting paid by Google to allow the pipe your paying for to connect to the pipe they are paying for. That's one of the big evils that Net Neutrality is specifically about preventing.

Personally, I think there should be two categories for ISPs, and it should be up to the individual ISP which one they want to be -- either a common carrier, in which case they are not legally responsible for anything going across their lines but are forbidden from pulling this kind of shit, or a private carrier, in which case they can pull all the BS they want on the lines, but are also ultimately legally responsible for all content on their network. If you pull filtering tricks or the kind of thing in this story, then since you are filtering the content in some form, your customers and those you peer to can assume said content is legal, as you are yb your own inspection process certifying it as such.

Now that every ISP takes the "common carrier -- I don't want sued out of existence because something illegal went across my lines" option, welcome to 'net neutrality. =p

Re:Confused.

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as an AC as I work for some of the parties involved.

The problem is that BT Wholesale wants to bypass the ISP altogether and offer BBC and Google's content directly to the consumer, probably moving to paid content later on.

This is a two tier internet in more sense than one. The "high speed" content does not go through the mandatory Great Firewall of Britain - the anti-paedo system. It also breaks the already completely b0rken British internet model in further and more fantastic ways to a point where near all Broadband vendors will have to have special builds for Britain (or to be more exact BT).

Aren't the pipes already being paid for?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the bandwidth Google uses not being paid for now? I know that ISP's charge me money to access the internet, and I'd imagine that Google already pays whatever service provider hooks their network into the internet. What am I missing here?

Re:Aren't the pipes already being paid for?

[Mavakoy]

Not in the UK (and presumably the rest of Europe) If someone calls/texts me, they get charged. I only pay for outgoing calls/text messages.

Re:Aren't the pipes already being paid for?

[ArhcAngel]

That would in fact be fairer than what they are trying to do. Take comcast as a good example. They just purchased NBC. Now let's say you are a comcast customer and you want to stream an episode of Chuck and then an episode of NCIS. Chuck streams great no lag or stuttering but NCIS coughs and sputters and buffers all the way through and you just think CBS.com sucks compared to NBC.com but in fact comcast saw you were streaming a show from a competitors web site and flagged your packets with a low priority so all other traffic gets to go first. Then CBS cries foul and comcast tells them if they want their content to get delivered without interruption they'll have to pay a "protection" fee to ensure on-time delivery. Now imagine they are doing this to ABC.com, Google, Yahoo, etc., etc. If they can get this practice federally labeled legal they stand to add billions to their bottom line for relatively no extra work.

BBC and Virgin Media

[Inda]

Let me get this right:

The BBC, who I have to pay by law, will have to pay Virgin Media, my ISP, who I already pay.

My money is going to who for what exactly?

Re:BBC and Virgin Media

[Anonymous Coward]

To the Shareholders of Virgin Media for their enrichment.

Re:Consensus?

[characterZer0]

I think most here generally support neutrality. Some argue that ISPs should be able to prioritize traffic based on type but not destination - they could give priority to latency critical, but low bandwidth, packets like VOIP at the expense of FTP; but not give priority to their own VOIP traffic above other VOIP traffic.

Re:how will they do this?

[durrr]

Oh no, it makes sense to intentionally cripple the presumably cheaper lower tier products when they have a nice and shiny, and more expensive, high tier product to offer when you get fed up, nevermind that the actual cost for the provider is the same, raional thought and logic have never been a problem for a good business plan.
As for packet inspection, a perfect oppotunity to implement it widely, just wait until they decide to put noninspectable packages in the not-moving-at-all-lane-until-key-provided.

Re:Newspeak

[mcvos]

So what exactly is my role in this? Does it mean I don't have to pay my ISP anymore, because now they're working for Google and other content providers?

Or does it mean that I'll keep paying the same, but my connection will be slower because my ISP wishes Google was their customer instead of me?

Re:Consensus?

[CohibaVancouver]

What are Slashdot's feelings on net neutrality generally?

To my mind, it makes sense to have pricing clearly defined based on the bandwidth you use. It should be no different than your electric bill where you're charged based on the power you use. Take my parents - They "do email," now and again watch youtube vids of the grandkids and surf the web a bit. Contrast this with my brother-in-law who is constantly torrenting, playing online games and using netflix. I'm somewhere in the middle. There should be a mechanism to charge us different rates based on our usage. My parents shouldn't be subsidizing my brother-in-law.

However the ISPs don't seem to be well equipped to build this sort of system...

Dark Fibre

[FalconZero]

But they don't pay for all of the pipes... Remember all that Dark Fibre they bought up in 2007?

I remember thinking they're preparing for this sort of thing (in one form or another) - they're pretty good at anticipating trends. If they've got the backbone bandwidth to trade for last mile bandwidth they'll be able to operate at substantially lower cost than other high bandwidth users (read:Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter - prime competetors all).

Go green!

[Quiet_Desperation]

How about a ten speed internet so you can downshift for steep hills?

Political posturing promotes protectionist policy

[Voxol]

IMO, this is about moving money to ISPs who are (in the UK) generally local companies whereas service providers are often foreign owned.

Net neutrality should probably be a WTO issue.

Re:How is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what happens today. Do you think your small business pays the same for Internet access as Google does?

ISPs just want an excuse to double bill businesses by threatening them to deprioritise their traffic; no matter what they already pay for their big pipes. Extortion by any other name ...

Re:Excellent

[FredFredrickson]

10 years from now, I can see it. "Daddy what's the internet? Was it anything like the googlenet is today?"

Re:Consensus?

[lmoelleb]

And that is how we ended up with the FTP over VOIP protocol.

Here's hoping...

[Lord Bitman]

I really just hope that these "bandwidth users" like google outright refuse to pay, and instead instantly cut off access from those ISPs which threaten them with such stupidity.

Re:Newspeak

[TheRaven64]

Actually, they don't. Google has peering agreements in a lot of places, so they pay nothing for bandwidth. Peering agreements exist because both parties benefit from the connectivity. I suspect that an ISP that tried to present Google with a bill would be told 'we're not going to pay, we're happy to simply blackhole your network. Have fun explaining to your users why they can't send mail or IMs to gmail users, can't browse YouTube and can't search the web with Google.'

Let's clarify the argument

[tygerstripes]

Nominally, this proposal will have no detrimental impact on any current service. Put simply, ISPs are being given the option to offer a "premium" service to those data suppliers who wish for their content to be delivered at a "premium" rate, at a premium price, thereby improving their perceived web experience.

To the simple-minded, this is a perfectly straightforward case of adding value to a service and charging for that added value. Nobody has to pay anything extra if they don't want to. However, this doesn't address the brutal reality.

Firstly, ISPs already saturate their bandwidth as far as they're able in order to be competitive. The creation of an express-lane for premium content will, by default, require the degrading of non-premium content delivery. Certainly the increased revenue could be used to improve infrastructure and have a net benefit on all bandwidth, but ISPs are businesses and it's fundamentally naive to assume this will be the result.

Secondly - and more importantly - this move would change the culture of the web irrevocably. In the first instance, content providers will have to pick a camp, and we will be faced with a two-tier system. Two-tier will just be the beginning though, and companies will have to quickly start incorporating their "content deliver" streaming costs into their business strategy. Like any variable, contracted service, it will be open to competition, abuse and legal dicking-about. It will change the very nature of the web, and we will all suffer from the lack of an even field.

A more subtle problem would be the loss of impetus to improve the efficiency of data delivery. As things stand, it is in every single person's and organisation's interest to constantly strive to improve the bandwidth-efficiency of their sites, languages, algorithms and services. As soon as the big guns find themselves able to take a short-cut to improving their users' web-experience by paying for it, half the major driving force behind these innovations in efficiency will be gone.

I'm sure there are many other reasons to oppose this change, and I honestly can't think of any compelling reason to approve it - unless, as I said, one takes the short-sighted, uninformed (or plain greedy) stance that this would improve certain uses of the web, at least for now.

Wrong Approach; Try Evil Instead

[oGMo]

Seriously... we all know Google etc already pay for the uplink, power, servers, etc, and the "users" that are using bandwidth are the people requesting. Who are also paying ISPs already for what they use (the ISPs wrote the contracts!).

Logic and reason aren't going to work here or they already would have. It's unfortunate Google has sworn off evil; they're in a unique position here to do what a less philanthropic business would have long ago: start demanding payment from ISPs, especially the big ones. Hey Comcast, want your users to have fast access to Google? You should start paying Google then. Or maybe AT&T will sign and your customers will go there, because everyone uses Google.

Of course, this will cause politicians etc to start whining about fairness, antitrust, and how the net should be neutral to large players. Congratulations, we win. =P

Re:Excellent

[Vernes]

No, son. It was a plaything of Politics. Goverments, Music industries, Extremists. Everybody threatened us with sanctions on what we did with the Internet. There even was a time we would stand to loose it completely as its usefulness was crippled. Internet's usefulness is directly connected to the amount of people using it. And who would use it if the risks got to high? We almost lost it all. Now shut up and finish your introduction game so Google can generate a personalized profile for you. You don't want to receive Viagra ads do you?

bandwidth users Google and the BBC

[Culture20]

"bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use"
They already face a bill for the pipes they use. Now someone wants to make them pay a bill for the pipes end users use to get to google and bbc, even though those pipes are already payed for by the end users.

Re:Newspeak

[Culture20]

peering agreement == barter == paying with bandwidth

The Honourable Edward Henry Butler Vaizey...

[fantomas]

...probably believes in a two-tier society generally, the nobility and the peasants! ;-)

This is a man (son of Lord Vaizey) who accidentally got £2000 worth of furniture delivered to "the wrong home", including an antique chair and paid it all back when the accounts committee found out.

Re:Consensus?

[TheEyes]

Why [have an FTP over VOIP protocol]? FTP doesn't need low latency. It'll hardly be affected.

Because to the telcoms "high latency" means "disconnect whatever transfers we don't like/aren't paid enough for" or "impersonate both sides of the connection and send RST packets".