Slashdot Mirror
BT Content Connect May Impact Net Neutrality
a Flatbed Darkly writes "BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet; BT has denied the allegations, from Open Rights Group among others, that this, despite certainly being an anti-competitive service, does not create a two-tier internet. From the article: '"Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will simply offer service providers the option of differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery," a BT spokeswoman said.'"
Far more worryingly than a CDN in the exchange which people might *gasp* be expected to pay for, the page promoting it http://www.contentconnect.bt.com/ Seems to include clips of "Elephants Dream" which is CC-BY licensed without any attribution anywhere that I can see.
Is it a two-tier Internet, or is it a glorified video-caching service? How is this different from Akamai?
Similar to those deployed by Akamai and Limelight for their customers, and by Google and Microsoft for themselves.
A typical case of a Telco moving into an additional market.
Arguably, it does allow BT to offer multi-tier services. But it is not packet-level differentiation
in the network, which is the issue at the heart of the net-neutrality debate.
If Content Distribution Networks violate net neutrality and the /. crowd thinks so, then
we should be blasting Akamai and Google long time before we started blasting the Telcos.