UK Minister Backs 'Two-Speed' Internet 226
Darkon writes "UK Culture minister Ed Vaizey has backed a 'two-speed internet', letting service providers charge content makers and customers for 'fast lane' access. It paves the way for an end to 'net neutrality' — with heavy bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use."
Re:Consensus? (Score:3, Interesting)
Net Neutrality would not be necessary if we had true choice for consumers among many companies.
But since we instead have monopoly (like Comcast) or duopoly (Comcast/Verizon), that creates the need for the government to regulate and impose net neutrality, the same way they impose it on the Telephone monopoly.
Political posturing promotes protectionist policy (Score:3, Interesting)
IMO, this is about moving money to ISPs who are (in the UK) generally local companies whereas service providers are often foreign owned.
Net neutrality should probably be a WTO issue.
Re:Somebody 'splain this to me (Score:1, Interesting)
Google is not only a search engine. It's also Youtube. Video streaming sites rise and fall with bandwidth.
This "priority line" has to come from somewhere. You'd be - quite frankly - an idiot to believe ISPs would create additional infrastructure. ISPs will just slow everything down to extort priority-fees to maintain current speeds.
Re:Confused. (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine if Google started shaping outgoing traffic based on incoming address. Boy oh boy, would we hear the gnashing of teeth and angry demands and accusations of monopolistic practices.
Without the content, there would be no reason for consumers to buy Internet service at all.
A suggestion? (Score:2, Interesting)
This seems interesting,
I don't know exactly what he is proposing, but a good idea could be...
The users pay the same amount of money and a guaranteed a minimum bandwidth... so suppose you are downloading some stuff from a random place(say xyz), you will get your minimum speed,
now here is the catch, the big companies (say youtube), can pay extra to the isp's so that on their websites you will get more than a minimum speed that you pay for,
so in the end, suppose i pay for a 4 mbps connection
i get 4 mbps when i download from xyz
and get 12 mbps when i download(stream) from youtube
everyones happy :) (or is someone not?)
Re:Excellent (Score:2, Interesting)
You are drastically underestimating how much it takes to run last mile to a hundred million buildings.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Google-Goes-the-Last-Mile-for-HighSpeed-Deployment-468055/
Re:Confused. (Score:5, Interesting)
Your ISP isn't getting paid by Google to allow the pipe your paying for to connect to the pipe they are paying for. That's one of the big evils that Net Neutrality is specifically about preventing.
Personally, I think there should be two categories for ISPs, and it should be up to the individual ISP which one they want to be -- either a common carrier, in which case they are not legally responsible for anything going across their lines but are forbidden from pulling this kind of shit, or a private carrier, in which case they can pull all the BS they want on the lines, but are also ultimately legally responsible for all content on their network. If you pull filtering tricks or the kind of thing in this story, then since you are filtering the content in some form, your customers and those you peer to can assume said content is legal, as you are yb your own inspection process certifying it as such.
Now that every ISP takes the "common carrier -- I don't want sued out of existence because something illegal went across my lines" option, welcome to 'net neutrality. =p
Re:Confused. (Score:3, Interesting)
Posting as an AC as I work for some of the parties involved.
The problem is that BT Wholesale wants to bypass the ISP altogether and offer BBC and Google's content directly to the consumer, probably moving to paid content later on.
This is a two tier internet in more sense than one. The "high speed" content does not go through the mandatory Great Firewall of Britain - the anti-paedo system. It also breaks the already completely b0rken British internet model in further and more fantastic ways to a point where near all Broadband vendors will have to have special builds for Britain (or to be more exact BT).
Re:Consensus? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think most here generally support neutrality. Some argue that ISPs should be able to prioritize traffic based on type but not destination - they could give priority to latency critical, but low bandwidth, packets like VOIP at the expense of FTP; but not give priority to their own VOIP traffic above other VOIP traffic.
The challenge with prioritization over the Internet is the trust model. If my ISP were to trust my network to mark priority levels there's nothing that prevents me from selfishly flagging all my traffic as real-time just to give myself lower-latency web browsing. So clearly the ISP won't trust anyone but themselves to mark traffic. Or maybe they trust me but only permit a certain percentage of bandwidth to be marked real-time, and charging me for that privilege depending on how big of a percentage I want. This is essentially how MPLS works today.
But then that data has to go somewhere, and it may traverse several other ISPs before reaching its destination, so all those other ISPs also have to trust that the traffic is flagged correctly and act appropriately. And if ISP X is sending 50% real-time traffic and ISP Y is sending 25% real-time traffic, the equitable peering arrangements that we have today are suddenly broken. Of course the natural solution then would be a centralized command and control to dictate and enforce how all these ISPs handle and charge one another for this traffic. And naturally this would be a government entity of some kind. Extrapolate from there yourselves.
This is why Net Neutrality is important.