Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality Is Already Gone 378
Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is "A Load of Bollocks". Anyone here been shaken down by their Internet Service Provider? "The new CEO of Virgin Media is putting his cards on the table early, branding net neutrality 'a load of bollocks' and claiming he's 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.'"
That sound you hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its the wrong term of reference (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell, ask the average Joe Sixpack if they'd like to have their American Idol episodes download faster at the expense of a bunch of pasty faced nerds not being able to access Slashdot at the same speed, I'm sure they'll be quite happy about it.
Meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe his bombastic words will provide good ammo to use against others like him, at least.
So Virgin Is the Enemy (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an industry claiming we don't need our equal access protected. And now, at the same time, telling us that it's gone, and we're whining too much because they've already destroyed it.
The enemy has blinked. There now should follow a backlash that will guarantee that we don't continue to give away our most profitable, most strategic global asset, that the public paid to invent, and build and promote, to those crooks who will say anything to steal it. And evidently are now so arrogant that they'll even admit they've already stolen it. Even though they haven't, or at least not so much that we can't take it back.
Re:This is Hilarious (Score:2, Insightful)
Which they now plan to roll out across the board, with an opt-out clause that essentially says "we'll be collecting all the data anyway, but promise not to give it to anybody".
Billing your competitor's customers (Score:5, Insightful)
See, there are actually four parties involved. The end user, Bob, buys a connection from an ISP, CableCo. Meanwhile, example.com, buys a connection from a different ISP, ExampleOnline. CableCo and ExampleOnline are competitors, but they have a peering agreement, which means that they agree to share the costs of a connection which lets Bob visit example.com. What's happening here is that CableCo is trying to get money from example.com. But example.com is ExampleOnline's customer! If ExampleOnline's customers are generating traffic which CableCo can't handle, then they need to renegotiate their peering agreement, not go after ExampleOnline's customers. That's unethical and possibly illegal.
Re:Bus lane analogy (Score:2, Insightful)
Speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised it its true.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally use Virgin cable, and although it is throttled its still 2x faster than any ADSL provider. I really don't like the idea of people messing with my packets, but when the only other option is DSL providers, who don't tell you that they mess with your packets, cable still makes sense. At least they are up front about it.
The wrong way round (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming (since I am not an expert on this) that the prioritisation of content is being done by some sort of prioritising of packets then it is a mutually exclusive situation. The line is only so fast - the line contains only so much bandwidth. If all providers pay to have their content prioritised then nothing moves any "faster" than it is with neutrality. If only one pays to have their content "faster" then all they are doing is degrading all other traffic.
ISP provisions need to be revolutionised - the current crop are perfectly happy as a hegemony of providers - do what they like, charge what they like. There is "competition" in only a very superficial sense.
A market solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:grow up (Score:5, Insightful)
So I'm not "fighting WW2", a ridiculous comment from yet another Anonymous Libertarian Coward. I'm trying to keep some corporate interloper from ruining something that's too important to ignore. And as a trivial side skirmish, I'm slapping down your nonsense about a "free market" that erupts across an open Internet only because it does have equal access.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:2, Insightful)
That is a breath of fresh air.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bus lane analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, it annoys me that someone can do something as bad as this and be honest about it yet receive no repercussions. I don't know whether this says more about Western civilisation in general or British ignorance towards the internet. Internet neutrality seems like a much bigger deal over than than here.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:4, Insightful)
You say this like it is impossible. (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you think the cable companies got started? One cable at a time.
You left out one government granted monopoly to use the right of way at a tyme.
FalconRe:Unfortunately... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Billing your competitor's customers (Score:4, Insightful)
This significantly distorts the market, since example.com can't just go elsewhere to access these customers. If CableCo is the only way to reach them, it basically has to pony up whatever CableCo asks for, or just give up that section of its customer base. And ultimately it's CableCo's customers who wind up paying for it, since--- to stay in business--- example.com will just past the additional costs along to its customers (e.g., the cost of premium services gets boosted so that CableCo can make its competition-free profit.)
If you were to consider an alternative model where CableCo offers tiered services, but the end-customer foots the bill for using these resources, you'd have a much healthier situation. If CableCo charges too much, then there's pressure on it (via regulation or competition) to lower its prices. In either case, the customer has an accurate perception of how much their ISP is charging them, and they're not subject to all of the hidden charges.
Which is, of course, exactly why companies like CableCo want to do things this way. It's much better to extract a rent from your customers without their knowing it.
Another argument for net neturality (Score:3, Insightful)
If you ditch net neutrality, each content provider has to negotiate contracts with every connectivity provider. So if there are N content providers and M ISPs, the system needs up to M*N contracts to function. That's a huge market inefficiency. Since ditching net neutrality doesn't magically create more bandwidth (it only prioritizes it), the system as a whole has gained zero additional capability at the cost of an enormous amount of extra paperwork. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, where each individual acting in their own best interests will result in the worst possible outcome for the system as a whole.
Also, the ISPs have yet to realized that this is a two-way street. If they start charging unaffiliated content providers extra money, the natural response is going to be content providers "unionizing" to increase their negotiating clout. Suddenly they'll be demanding lower network connectivity prices than they were initially charged. "You ISPs are getting money from other content providers, but haven't dropped your prices! We demand the prices you charge us reflect your new cost of operation."
The end result of all this will be a lot of running around to arrive at exactly where we started. It's stupid, wasteful, and inefficient. That's why net neutrality makes sense. If there's a bandwidth problem, the solution is to add more bandwidth; none of this stealing from the right hand to pay the left silliness.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:4, Insightful)
1/ This isn't in the US.
2/ (In the US, at least) These companies tend to have government-granted monopoly status, where you're not allowed to compete with them. This is why US broadband sucks so much.
Time for the Government to Take Over? (Score:4, Insightful)
As a bonus for the security-minded, if the government operated the public network, they wouldn't have to go cap-in-hand to the private sector for permission to monitor traffic. There are cameras on all the major highway intersections, and no one complains. The same could be done for a data network.
Governments aren't as cost-effective as private enterprise, but they have the terrific advantage of operating more in the public eye. For a public resource, this is an extremely valuable characteristic.
The fact is, telecom doesn't operate in a free market, so almost none of the normal arguments for letting private enterprise take the lead are valid. Competition doesn't truly exist, so corporations are free to invent ever more resourceful ways to make us pay more for less.
At the very least, a publicly-run network would be more responsive to ordinary users who at least have a vote. As it stands now, we really are at the telecomm's mercy.
Re:the free market and libertarians (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you're referring to some characters in an Ayn Rand novel. Those are all fiction.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:1, Insightful)
The only people who will care are the users who would frequent places like Slashdot.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:3, Insightful)
Faced with the prospect of a (small) horde of P2P users ruining the service for all their other users, Virgin have implemented what has to be one of the most fair and lenient ways of spreading the load, by limiting the impact that the minority has during the period when the segment of their customer base that is least likely to be understanding about a poor connection is online.
For the remaining 19 hours of the day you are free to exercise your bandwidth to it's limit. Bear in mind that 50Mbit/s is equivalent to at least 4 simultaneous broadcast quality DVB-T channels - if you can't pull in enough content to satisfy you across that kind of bandwidth, you either have serious ADD, or you're a warez duplicator.
ASDL ISPs in the UK typically cap your monthly download bandwidth instead, which isn't nearly as fair (doesn't address the real problem of peak-time congestion), or as useful - a 5 hour throttle down to 2MBit/s isn't nearly as painful as having your connection choked to sub-modem speeds for the rest of the month.
Unless you have a business need for that much bandwidth, in which case you shouldn't be using a residential ISP service.
Yes, it would be great if they had enough capacity to serve everyone at full speed all the time. It would be great if their marketing wasn't misleading about speed. But frankly, if you're a technically adept user you should appreciate the difficulty of providing all-you-can-eat bandwidth, and you should take marketing with a pinch of salt.
I initially found it a pain in the ass too, then I just changed my habits, queued downloads for after 2100, etc. I also took a deep breath and remembered that even when my connection was throttled, it was still 180 times faster than the crappy old 56k modem I used to use.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think you can claim that Virgin Media has a monopoly just because you "don't use" the competitors. The ADSL providers are the competitors to cable Internet.
Re:This is Hilarious (Score:1, Insightful)
As soon as they get a semi-decent userbase, Tiscali will buy them. It's probably best for you to be quiet and keep the good ISP as your little secret.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:3, Insightful)
Kingston Communications was Hull's own telephone company and network. I don't know the history of it, though I expect it's interesting. And having not been to Hull for a few years, I don't know what the situation is today. But based on my experience with them, no-one ever complained because they were quite frankly very much better than the rest of the country.
As regards the poster who's saying net neutrality is already gone, there's room for it to get a whole Hell of a lot worse and we have to fight it till it's dead and it stays dead. He might say that the loss of Slashdotters as customers is not going to bother him, but I'm personally responsible for eight friends and one company's choice of provider just by myself. The IT community is not the community to piss off if you're an IT company.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then the idiots will realize that the money they're losing due to people using an unrestricted service is greater than what they'll be getting by extorting the companies who make people WANT TO PAY YOU FOR INTERNET ACCESS.
Problem is that many areas are only served by one ISP/cable company, often with a government grated monopoly. In those cases there's no where else to really turn. IMHO, if they government put in restrictions to restrict competition, they should also put in laws to fix the problems that competition would have fixed.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to stop ranting and instead start discussing ways to protect freedom of information and privacy. ISP's have a very real problem in that bandwidth is not free and a small percentage of users do in fact use the majority of bandwidth. The real problem is more about truth in advertising. We share bandwidth and the routers can only handle so much traffic.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:5, Insightful)
What providers try to do now is to say "yes, I know both sides already paid for a certain amount of data to be delivered. Now I want to be paid to make sure that nothing happens to said data." I don't have a problem with dynamic throttling of all sites, or any other generic traffic shaping. What I do object to is ISPs trying to tell me that msn.com will load quickly (because MS paid up), but google.com won't (because Google hasn't).
If you think Net Neutrality isn't a big deal, it is. As a matter of fact, it is the reason that we have Amazon.com, Netflix, Google, Yahoo or any of the other major internet players. They would have died in an environment where they would have had to pay to load as quickly as other established players.
Re:grow up (Score:3, Insightful)
One problem with libertarians is that you don't properly distinguish between the specific and the general. Like when you just capitalized "Libertarianism": that's the specific ideology of the Libertarian Party, not the general ideology of the political philosophy.
That tendency to conflation also underwrites the thinking in that entire post you just made. I never said "well, [l]ibertariams support the free market, and this happened in a free market, so, ummm DEATH TO LIBERTARIANS!" or anything close. In fact, I pointed out that the market in which Virgin's making its grab is not free, just the most obvious way in which your contrived "summary" is unconnected to reality. But it is a self-serving oversimplification, from a libertarian, so of course I should dignify it with the respect of a logical response
Libertarianism is political extremism, worshiping liberty while ignoring every other value, fetishizing a reductionist logic ad absurdum. I've had to deal with it for years, as generation after generation discovers Ayn Rand and "the virtue of selfishness" for itself, as if the world were brand new. There's as little chance of clear and reasoned debate about extremist libertarianism as there is about any other fundamentalism, as I've learned over and again for so long. No, it's much better to just laugh at it, because it's really better as a joke. Taking it seriously is just much too sad.