Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is “A Load of Bollocks”
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The new CEO of Virgin Media (formally NTL) has put his cards on the table, branding net neutrality "a load of bollocks" and claims that he is already doing deals to deliver some people's content faster than others.
If you aren't prepared to cough up the extra cash, he says he'll put you in the Internet "bus lane".
Net neutrality which I blogged about recently in connection with British Telecom, really is the hot topic at the moment, especially in the USA where it was ignited by the Comcast fiasco; the concept of net neutrality has certainly been brought into the mainstream.
Most ISPs are never quite forthcoming about their throttling, capping and otherwise interfering behaviour, but that crowd certainly doesn't include the CEO of Virgin Media, the UK's second largest ISP.
In an interview with the Royal Television Society's Television magazine, far from covering up their intentions, Virgin Media's new incoming CEO Neil Berkett - who joined the Virgin Media Board just a few days ago - has launched an attack on the ideas and principles behind net neutrality.
"This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks," he said, adding that Virgin is already in the process of doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers.
With around 3.5 million customers here in the UK, and already traffic shaping due to lack of capacity, it's a sobering thought that at the behest of "content providers" with deep pockets, Virgin is prepared to speed up their traffic, which would presumably have a negative impact on those at the bottom of the ISP's priority list, namely bandwidth hungry file-sharers.
Berkett then turned on the BBC and their iPlayer service, telling them - and other public broadcasters like them - that if they don't pay a premium to gain faster access to Virgin Media's customers, their service would be put into "bus lanes".
It shows, that just like I said in my earlier post on net neutrality, some ISPs are happy to throttle just about anyone in the name of profit, it's just that most aren't as open about it as Mr Berkett.
It is my opinion, that the Government here in the UK should adopt similar laws to what has been done in the USA when it comes to Net Neutrality. The downside of what Virgin is proposing, means that you and me (the users) could end up with not being able to access Youtube for example, due to its bandwidth use, or in the extream we could end up with only being able to access websites which our Internet Providers let us access, much like mobile phone companies do when your browsing the mobile web.
Posted by Mary Blighthouse. 11:33 AM
Labels: British Telecom, Network Neutrality, Virgin Media
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