At present your Internet Service Provider (ISP) does not discriminate between different types of web data. So the text, images etc. of this Left Foot Forward article are delivered to you at the same speed as a page from the BBC News website or an auction page on eBay.
Net neutrality: it sounds a bit geeky, a bit nerdy, and no one in British politics really seems to understand it. The term might have entered your consciousness yesterday if you read one of the stories appearing in the media with a title along the lines of the BBC’s “Minister Ed Vaizey backs ‘two-speed‘ internet”. So what’s the problem I hear you ask?
Public versus private is essentially the problem – that’s the reason why Labour needs a resolute response to Mr Vaizey’s proposals, and why Liberal Democrats should also be profoundly concerned about the coalition’s thinking on this.
At present your Internet Service Provider (ISP) does not discriminate between different types of web data. So the text, images etc. of this Left Foot Forward article are delivered to you at the same speed as a page from the BBC News website or an auction page on eBay.
Fast forward to the internet system advocated by Mr Vaizey and that would not necessarily be so. eBay could strike a deal with your ISP, meaning eBay pages load much faster than Left Foot Forward or BBC pages do.
For text and images you might not notice the difference. But how about video? Not only does online video require considerably more data transfer, but the major UK player in the online video sector – BBC’s iPlayer – is run by a public sector broadcaster. It would, as a matter of principle, not enter into bargains with some ISPs rather than others for faster provision of its services.
There’s an alternative company that would have no such qualms; News Corp, already dominant in the UK newspaper market, is aiming to take full control of Sky, and Sky is already an ISP as well as a television company. Get Sky Sports on your PC in HD quality, but iPlayer will be clunky and slow.
Mr Vaizey says all of this is not a problem in a liberalised market as consumers can change their ISP freely. True in theory, but anyone who’s ever gone through that process knows it is time consuming and fraught with difficulties. A simple choice akin to buying one brand of baked beans or the other it is not. As ever Tom Watson is doing his best to highlight these issues – and yesterday pubished a Commons Early Day Motion on this issue – but he seems to be rather a lone voice in the Labour party just now.
It is time more progressives woke up to these issues.
• For more on the issue see ArsTechnica and The Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog.
40 Responses to “Why progressives need to wake up about net neutrality”
Kunglu
RT @leftfootfwd: Why progressives need to wake up about net neutrality: http://bit.ly/d7FIrx writes @JonWorth
scandalousbill
Hi Cim,
Good post, but I feel that your position underestimates the nature of triple/quadruple play service offerings, their growth potential, particularly the future of IPTV and other on demand and interactive multimedia services, and the increased capacity demands these services will imply. . As the so called home gateways, femtocells etc. increase, multiple in home usage of bandwidth intensive applications will follow, (e.g. Dad and mom watching web delivered HDTV, junior playing video games, sister making Videocalls etc. This occurs within a context where business demands for bandwidth capacity are also rising rapidly. Within this context, the deployment of usage based pricing can be problematic. Let us review your example in this context.
You state: “Given that Skype does have higher network requirements than web browsing, charging a premium for it (or giving a discount for connections that don’t need it) isn’t actually unreasonable.”
First of all, this is a rather one sided approach in favour of the bandwidth provider. If a premium is to be charged for more capacity usage, should the user not be entitled to a discount for the provider’s failure to deliver a consistent level of bandwidth rate contracted for to the user? If I contract for 50 Megs and get 10megs, why should my contract remain valid? If you paid a contractor to provide a new kitchen, and he simply gives you a new cooker, can you not refuse payment and take further legal action?
The present approach allowed by OFCOM, citing the infamous “up to” clause has resulted in not one single supplier delivering the contracted bandwidth. Yes, last mile traffic inhibitors and limitations always apply, but none of these factors are reflected in the provider’s marketing or pricing of the service. Although more subscribers are added to the service, the concentrators and backhaul remain largely the same and users are required to divide up the bandwidth available. The more users connected, the greater the concurrency, the less bandwidth for each individual user. Even though long term contracts are the norm, there is no Service Level Agreement afforded to the user. This practice enables an easy method of cost recover to the provider, i.e. more subscription revenue for the same deployments.
.When you then permit the provider to implement a differentiated prioritization and pricing scheme within this already one sided relationship, you stack the deck further in favour of the service provider. Any business manager who wants to retain his job, when confronted with a situation of, say, a pay per view revenue stream for 100 subscribers will prioritize this stream even if he has 200 users who pay a basic rate, who may not enjoy or face service disruption their lower capacity level services. Money talks, pure and simple. To change provider, in most cases in the UK, invokes a penalty for early termination. Although these factors are generally common to all providers, they are by nature, internal business matters. The playing field is the same. They all do it!
The situation will only exacerbate as the bandwidth demands increase. The growth in network capacity, to the levels required to facilitate the Coalition dream of high speed bandwidth for all, under the proposed two tiered system is most likely to be much slower than if a net neutral system was adopted by legislation. From my experience, a startup telecom company, or large scale ISP, in the present UK licensing environment, has as much chance of survival as a turkey at Christmas.
Shaun Dyer
RT @leftfootfwd: Why progressives need to wake up about net neutrality: http://bit.ly/d7FIrx writes @JonWorth
Look Left – Cameron adviser resigns after "disgraceful" remarks | Left Foot Forward
[…] In essence, what Mr Vaizey proposes is an online ‘free market’, which, as Jon Worth explained on Left Foot Forward today, could result in text and images loading slower on some sites than […]
Spir.Sotiropoulou
RT @leftfootfwd: Why progressives need to wake up about net neutrality http://bit.ly/digMEe