Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare

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?

Continues at: Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare | PC Pro blog.