BT Content Connect May Impact Net Neutrality 138
a Flatbed Darkly writes "BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet; BT has denied the allegations, from Open Rights Group among others, that this, despite certainly being an anti-competitive service, does not create a two-tier internet. From the article: '"Contrary to recent reports in the media, BT's Content Connect service will not create a two-tier internet, but will simply offer service providers the option of differentiating their broadband offering through enhanced content delivery," a BT spokeswoman said.'"
Re:Welcome to new-speak (Score:5, Interesting)
Far more worryingly than a CDN in the exchange which people might *gasp* be expected to pay for, the page promoting it http://www.contentconnect.bt.com/ [bt.com] Seems to include clips of "Elephants Dream" which is CC-BY licensed without any attribution anywhere that I can see.
Re:Welcome to new-speak (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it a two-tier Internet, or is it a glorified video-caching service? How is this different from Akamai?
Re:Welcome to new-speak (Score:4, Interesting)
If you dont pay you can wait for the converted "Bring out your dead" cart to be filled and get pushed along a dirt track. -kept to the shared, oversubscribed best effort networks.
BT should have spent more on backhaul.
Re:Welcome to new-speak (Score:4, Interesting)
CC-BY license requires attribution according to how the rights-holder specifies; it's not specified by the CC-BY license terms itself.
Without knowing how the copyright owner wants it to be specified, you can't know whether a specific method of attribution is in compliance.
This is your run of the mill CDN (Score:5, Interesting)
Similar to those deployed by Akamai and Limelight for their customers, and by Google and Microsoft for themselves.
A typical case of a Telco moving into an additional market.
Arguably, it does allow BT to offer multi-tier services. But it is not packet-level differentiation
in the network, which is the issue at the heart of the net-neutrality debate.
If Content Distribution Networks violate net neutrality and the /. crowd thinks so, then
we should be blasting Akamai and Google long time before we started blasting the Telcos.
Re:akamai (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is basically an Akamai-like caching server. And I can see where the controversy lies.
If BT implements this and doesn't intentionally throttle other services, I don't see this as a violation of neutrality - BT is not discriminating against anyone in using the Internet pipe, they are simply maintaining a cache service for those who want to cough up a little more dough for their web sites to be stored in a local cache. BP customers can still access anything they want on the Internet at Internet speeds, but certain things run at local speed which is faster.
However, I can see how this could be easily abused, if BT started speeding up the Internet packets (*) coming from their customers who paid for the caching service and slowing down everyone else's, or started blocking or throttling sites that refused to pay for it, or lowered their overall Internet connection to the point where only cached sites were useful.
I can also see how this could be interpreted as a "two tier" system, but such systems have been in use for quite some years in the US and have been very successful here. They do make some web pages faster than others, but I haven't seen many reports of ISPs intentionally throttling their regular Internet bandwidth to punish service providers who don't pay up. I've heard of ISPs who try to force high-bandwidth content providers to subscribe, and that's wrong, but that's a matter of abusing the technology, not a problem inherent to the technology.
Frankly, I don't understand why an ISP wouldn't want to simply start caching all static content. But, unfortunately, that means that most content they really want to cache is not going to be. Streaming video from someone like NetFlix is encrypted so the movie you watch is a different set of bits from the same exact movie your neighbor watches 5 minutes later. BitTorrent is not only comprised of a great deal of illegal content that the ISPs don't want in their cache servers, it's also frequently encrypted, and the BitTorrent protocol is going to tend to prefer "local" clients so it's already optimized to save backbone usage when possible anyway.
YouTube would be brilliant for this sort of thing, and YouTube actually uses Akamai if I recall correctly.
(*) By "Internet packets", I'm referring to caching customers who might only cache static content. This is how my company uses Akamai - we give Akamai a copy of all of our static content (ie. pictures of our product), they replicate it out to all of their edge servers around the world as needed, and we simply use an Akamai URL to access the image on the web site. Akamai automatically determines the closest server to the customer and serves them up the replacement image. All encrypted and dynamic content is directly between the customer and our web servers.