UK Government: will not support Net Neutrality | Hacker News Reader

UK Government: will not support Net Neutrality

bloomberg.com

29 pointsjustsee37 comments

I suppose that will end up giving ISPs the right to charge the BBC for handling their video stream traffic. Which effectively means private companies siphoning off BBC license revenue for their own pockets.

I really hope that if they go ahead with this that they clear all barriers to allow the BBC to run it's own ISP, and compete on selection of netural traffic. At least that way, people get a choice how many times they pay for the same content.

What good is video content streaming from a public broadcaster if you have to pay private organisations again to see that content you've already paid the BBC for?

The TV license is currently only required for watching traditional TV, live, isn't it? I haven't paid it for years, and exclusively use the on-demand BBC iPlayer website every so often.

you're right but they want to change that

This appears to be correct, though it's not guaranteed to remain so: see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/01/iplayer_does_... and http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/playing_tv_progs/... .

[EDITED to add: But if you watch a programme at the same time as it's being broadcast, you do need a licence.]

Don't you feel like you should get a license? Regardless of wether you're legally supposed to.

The sheer quality of programming they put out. Buy a license.

I don't watch often enough. I'd consider microtransactions in the iPlayer, but not a flat £145 per year.

Which is from memory less than Sky charges for content that includes adverts and is (IMHO) of vastly lower quality. Certainly far less of Sky's content is original productions.

I'd never get Sky. In fact I convinced a family member to cancel theirs becuase they were getting little value from it.

An interesting question I'm starting to ask myself is whether giving the ISPs this option might finally give them the incentive to make multicasting a paid-for service for broadcasters, potentially driving down the net cost to broadcasters. Hmmm...

(Disclaimer: these views are my own, etc.)

Which effectively means private companies siphoning off BBC license revenue for their own pockets

Then you don't know much about the BBC, it's been farming work out to private companies for a lloooonng time. Do you think it currently gets its bandwidth for free? Or provided by another government department?

In those instances, the BBC is paying for a product. In the case being discussed here, the BBC is being shaken down.

It's "paying" someone to operate its antennas too, you know.

The thing is - if the BBC pay they're being utterly stupid

"Your ISP doesn't support the BBC IPlayer - please let them know about it here"

strikes me as a pretty obvious marketing tool.

In exactly the same way, not providing access to youtube would probably be the most moronic thing most ISPs could do.

If the BBC pay anybody else beyond their own bandwidth costs, the top brass should be sacked.

But.... that only works for the big boys. Imagine how YouTube would've got going if this rule had been around in 2005 - they'd have been strangled at birth by individual ISPs each demanding their own contract and their own payment.

What we have here is fundamentally ISPs trying to run a private toll booth by claiming that 'others are profiting from their network'. Not at all true. The BBC, YouTube, whoever, all pay their outgoing bandwidth bills to their network provided. I pay my incoming bandwidth bill to my network provider (and outgoing, for that matter, when I put my content provider hat on and legally upload to various sites). All parties are getting correctly paid in proportion to the value of the services that they are delivering, but the ISPs know they are a critical man-in-the-middle and can potentially extract value from this proposition in exactly the same way that rebel armies set up 'checkpoints' in territories they control.

ISPs should be ashamed that they're trying it. The Conservative Party should be utterly ashamed that they think it's a good idea and I plan to write to my local (Conservative) MP to inform him of this.

This is not such a big deal as it would be in the US. We have a lot more competition, so "let the market sort it out" is more or less a reasonable position.

Exactly. I can get my Internet connection from 100+ companies. In the US, as far as I've seen, it's 2 companies if you're lucky.

In the UK, the market will decide what people want from their internet connection, and customers have more than enough choice to decide what they want.

I'm glad the government is keeping out of it.

To give a real world example:

Quite a few ISPs in the UK institute bandwidth caps. Sometimes these caps can be horrendously expensive compared to the real cost of the bandwidth (i.e. high markup).

But there's also quite a few ISPs with no unreasonable bandwidth caps. I have the choice to use one of these ISPs instead (and I do).

Same deal with net neutrality. If non-neutral ISPs pop up, then you can be sure that neutral ones will too. There's no better selling point than "we're cheaper than those guys".

I think the government is right not to mess with a well functioning market when there's not even a problem yet. I'm not so keen on them trying to spin non-neutral practices into a good thing (this may just be the article sensationalising).

Good example.

As for the spin, I think it's good to give people choice. For example if people want to get a cheaper internet connection that's watered down version without 'premium' websites which cost extra, then that's fair enough.

I don't think anything like that would work well though. People expect the internet to mean 'everything' on a level playing field.

As a counter example, if can only get your broadband via cable, you're stuck with Virgin Media (I think) who have quite an onerous capping policy [1] unless you fork out for 50Mb fibre optic.

[1] http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-... - in particular, note the evening fair use amount: 3.5Gb

Sadly, you can't choose to get your broadband "only via cable" - Virgin still requires you to pony up for the phone line.

I'm currently paying Sky £10 a month for a landline phone that I will never use, and £11 a month for the Internet.

Virgin offer packages which don't require a BT Line. It may be that you are not cabled up suitably for such a deal (we used to pay our cable operator, now Virgin, for a telephone line which we could not get but they gave us 'free' TV which is what we actually wanted to buy).

http://shop.virginmedia.com//bundles/specials/affiliate/dual...

All other providers do require a BT line, though some people would say it's a landline phone line that you /always/ use...assuming you leave your router on.

> "All other providers do require a BT line"

Untrue. Most exchanges now have LLU which allows you to get your phone+ADSL from other providers. You may still need to get your phone line from BT, but that's not the case in many places.

The vast majority can get ADSL now. I believe coverage is 95%+

Obviously it sucks for the few exchanges that can't do ADSL. Then your only real options are 3G, satellite, or install your own dedicated line.

Are there really not that many isps over in the US?

(although thinking about it, whenever I hear about US isps it is always the same few companies (comcast comes to mind))

Here in San Francisco, we really have Comcast and Astound (a localish one). I don't know of any except those two.

Two is nice to have. I'm back to two cable providers plus DSL, but last year I had the choice of Comcast, or something slow, pricey and wireless. And that was in the Boston suburbs, not the mountains of Idaho or something.

Network infrastructure in the USA is startlingly primitive and monopolistic.

When I was in US (Palo Alto) I think you could get comcast or excite (Y! @home or something). Pretty sure the choice was limited to 2.

In Washington DC, the nations capital, there's only Verizon and Comcast, as far as I know.

There's RCN as well which didn't suck when I lived there. I think DC is mostly the exception.

Many U.S. cities have historically granted right of way (to run cables) to one "phone" company and one "cable" company. In my area, we have AT&T and Comcast. It's up to the cities to allow more competitors, and many are unwilling to do that (or unable, if they have long-term agreements with the existing carriers).

It's a classic case of public policy lagging behind technology, with politicians having no concern for technological progress and free market principles, unwisely entering into long-term agreements with telecom companies.

Unless I'm terribly mistaken, one of the main reasons cities entered into agreements with cable companies, etc was that the cable companies wouldn't lay down cable unless they were granted a monopoly in the area.

Plus…keep calm and carry on. The British are going to be slow to adopt net neutrality because they may as well just let the market sort it out until the market f*s up too badly, then they'll look at it.

This is highly dependent on where you live. Varying wildly between exchanges.

Where I live in London I can't move for ISP's. Where my brother lives in Norfolk (the countryside) he technically has the exact same number of ADSL ISP's but only two will actually give him contracts.

Exactly. All's well (for the most part) in the major cities, but if you're not in one of them you're damned. Basically, it's BT network for sneakernet for you. Good luck finding a BT reseller that's not got bandwidth caps or some sort of shaping. (I know they exist, but there's not many of them - and if you do want those things, you'll probably need a business line).

There's lots of ISPs who have residential packages with no traffic shaping and bandwidth caps that you can't reasonably hit with non-commercial use.

I use ADSL24 and they're offering up to 90GB/month caps for 'peak' times, and no caps for off-peak: http://adsl24.co.uk/broadband/

That's a huge amount of data transfer, especially considering that if you're in a rural exchange you're probably not getting the high ends of ADSL speeds or ADSL2+ and would find streaming video and the like a frustrating experience in any case.

This will disrupt the chances of any new media startups in the UK. It is also good news for companies like Sky that compete with the BBC and have an ISP service.

Sky got good value for money donating to Ed Vaizey last election: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/100927/...

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