Imagine that you get home tonight, flick on the TV and BBC1 isn’t there. Not absent because of a strike or a temporary technical fault, but because ITV had paid Sky not to carry BBC1 on its satellite network so that it could gobble up a greater share of the viewing figures.
I suspect it would cause a bit of a stir. The Daily Mail would be apoplectic. #burnrupertmurdoch would be a trending topic on Twitter in less time than it takes to strike a match.
Yet, Britain’s biggest ISPs and Ofcom are driving us towards exactly this kind of scenario on the internet. At a Westminster eForum last week, TalkTalk’s director of strategy unashamedly admitted that he could foresee a situation where Google paid his company to give YouTube priority bandwidth over the BBC iPlayer. His counterpart from BT said likewise. Both described it as a “legitimate business practice”.
So Britain’s two biggest ISPs, with more than seven million customers between them, would happily cripple a publicly-funded service for a pot of cash. And for those, like my colleagues David Fearon and Tim Danton on last week’s PC Pro podcast, who argue that this is an over-reaction, that giving one service priority over another doesn’t mean the other wouldn’t work, ask yourself this: why would content providers pay an ISP for priority bandwidth if everything worked hunky dory without it?
Why would content providers pay an ISP for priority bandwidth if everything worked hunky dory without it?
Worse still, we’re not only talking about giving one more bandwidth than the other: the prospect of ISPs actually cutting off websites because their rivals have paid for exclusivity is also being discussed at the very highest levels.
Nigel Hickson, head of EU and international ICT policy at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, said the Government was actively considering the following type of scenario:
“I sign up to the two-year contract [with an ISP] and after 18 months my daughter comes and knocks on the lounge door and says – Father, I can’t access Facebook anymore. I say – why? She says – it is quite obvious, I have gone to the site and I have found that TalkTalk, BT, Virgin, Sky, whatever don’t take Facebook anymore, Facebook wouldn’t pay them the money, but YouTube has so I have gone to YouTube. Minister, is that acceptable? That is the sort of question that we face.”
For most people, the answer to that question would be ‘absolutely not’. For telecoms regulator Ofcom, the answer is ‘bring it on’.
Laissez-faire regulator
Ofcom has recently completed a public consultation on net neutrality. The results are absolutely frightening, if Alex Blowers, the regulator’s international director, is to be believed.
When I asked him specifically if Ofcom had any objections to content owners paying ISPs for preferential traffic, he replied:
“We were very clear in our discussion document that we see the real economic merits to the idea of allowing a two-sided market to emerge, particularly for applications like IPTV where it seems to us that the consumer expectation will be a surface which is of a reasonably consistent quality that allows you to actually sit down at the beginning of a film and watch it to the end without constant problems of jitter or the picture hanging or whatever.
So from our point of view we were pretty clear on that point, and nobody has yet knocked us off that view that a two-sided market could be economically beneficial. The issue is, as always, the devil is in the detail.”
To be fair to Blowers, he did say that both the EU and Ofcom would demand transparency from the ISPs, and that the EU would almost certainly object to the outright blocking of legal services. But just because a particular website or service isn’t blocked, it doesn’t mean it can’t suffer irreparable damage.
The Skype problem
Net neutrality has already been smashed by most of Britain’s biggest ISPs. All of the big six British ISPs routinely discriminate between different types of internet traffic: putting the brakes on peer-to-peer traffic during peak hours, for example. They claim this is necessary to deliver a smooth and consistent service to all of their customers, although it’s worth noting that the seven-time winner of PC Pro’s broadband ISP award, Zen Internet, doesn’t deploy traffic management (and is routinely praised for the speed of its connections), nor do some of the big ISPs in the US.
Slowing peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl doesn’t only harm the bandwidth hogs who are trying to download ten different HD movies from Pirate Bay, it harms legitimate services too
This blanket discrimination against certain protocols can be enormously damaging. Slowing peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl doesn’t only harm the bandwidth hogs who are trying to download ten different HD movies from Pirate Bay, it harms legitimate services too.
As Skype’s director of government and regulatory affairs, Jean-Jacques Sahel, pointed out:
“Peer-to-peer applications are very wide ranging, they go from the lovely peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that were referred to in the Digital Economy Act, all the way to things like the BBC iPlayer [which used to be P2P] or indeed Skype, which is both a VoIP and a peer-to-peer application. So what does that mean? If I manage my traffic from a technical perspective, knowing that Skype actually doesn’t eat up much bandwidth at all, why should that be de‐prioritised because it’s peer-to-peer as opposed to any other applications.”
Sahel pointed to the mobile market as a prime example of the harmful effects of such blocking. Skype is routinely blocked – both by protocol and specifically – by British mobile networks, who are worried that the VoIP service would harm their voice revenues. Campaigners such as The Open Rights Group’s chief executive Jim Killock are worried that fixed-line broadband is heading down the same path:
“You look at the levels of restriction on devices in the mobile sector compared to what we are able to do on our computers at home and it’s an entirely different world. This is why I say look at the mobile market, think if that is how you want your internet and your devices to work in the future because that is sort of where these things are leading.”
Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare, and the powers that be think it’s a good thing.
Read more: Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare | PC Pro blog http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/10/07/britains-sleepwalking-into-a-net-neut...
