Last week
several UK ISPs banded together to tell the BBC that their iPlayer application was "overwhelming" their networks, and that unless the BBC pay them to increase their network capacity they will start throttling the traffic being sent over their networks by iPlayer.
In the same week, in an interview with the Royal Television Society's Television magazine,
Neil Berkett (the new CEO of Virgin Media) attacked the concept of net neutrality describing it as a "load of bollocks".
For those not familiar with the term (net neutrality, not bollocks), Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu defines net neutrality as "the idea is that a maximally useful public information network aspires to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally."
What the issue essentially boils down to is that ISPs around the world are starting to see an increase in the traffic being sent across their networks as bandwidth hungry applications like Bittorrent and video on demand (VOD) services break into the mainstream.
Rather than investing money in their network infrastructures themselves, ISPs seem to have banded together to try and get content providers like the BBC to pay for it instead.
Whether net neutrality is right or wrong is a side issue, as the idea of content providers having to pay ISPs to upgrade their networks is ridiculous, comparable to expecting car manufacturers being asked to pay to build more roads.
In the interview with Television magazine, Neil Berkett claims Virgin Media are already in talks with several content providers about paying for a priority service over their network.
As someone who's a supporter of net neutrality, this worries me, and using the following analogy I’ll explain why:
Firstly, imagine a scenario where you have two companies who both produce video podcasts about technology.
One is a small start-up with limited funding (let's call them Web Start-up) and the other an existing media company with deep pockets (we'll call them Old Money).
Because Web Start-up has limited funding, they are unable to pay Virgin Media for higher priority across their network but Old Money can so they do.
In this example whenever users on Virgin Media's network try to watch Web Start-up’s video podcast streaming online they find they can only watch a few minutes at a time before it pauses to re-buffer the video.
Because Old Money is paying for a higher priority their viewers don’t experience this problem.
Without even considering the content of the two podcasts, Old Money’s viewers are getting a better experience and therefore more likely to keep viewers.
This gives Virgin a lot of power, which could then be abused. This brings me onto my second point.
Now let’s imagine that despite the setback Web Start-up faced, they produce a podcast that’s so good they get significant numbers of viewers.
It’s possible that Old Money can approach Virgin and agree a deal that on top of just giving Old Money a higher priority service across their network they also agree to shape traffic in a way that also further deteriorates competing services, such as Web Start-up’s.
While competition law would make it difficult for the contract to state it in these blatant terms, I’m sure a good corporate lawyer would find a way around them.
Finally, my last point covers why even Old Money should be for net neutrality.
Even if Old Money pays Virgin Media, this would only cover Virgin Media's customers. Old Money would also have to pay every other ISP who charges for higher priorities, possibly including those from the rest of the world, to be able to provide a good service to their subscribers; the cost of this could be astronomical and probably prohibitive.
Instead of money being used to produce better content, this money goes to ISPs to basically pay for the fact their networks cannot cope with the demand their customers are putting on it.
I hope I have demonstrated that when you start charging content providers for bandwidth services, you start getting into some very murky areas.
I also believe that when you force content providers to play on a level playing field you force them to make better content, which we can all agree can only be a good thing.
