According to TorrentFreak, Neil Berkett, incoming CEO of Virgin Media, says he’ll happily slow down the Internet traffic of any media provider who doesn’t pay him a tidy little premium. In fact, he told the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine that if the BBC and and other public broadcasters don’t pay up for timely delivery of services like iPlayer, he’ll put them in the “bus lane.”

I believe it was Preston Gralla who first described the tiered-Internet scheme as “cyberextortion” back in 2006. Since then, the telecommunications industry has managed to re-shape the debate so that it’s less about blatantly demanding more money from companies who can afford to pay it and shoving those who either refuse to pay or can’t afford to pay into a slowpoke delivery lane, and more about responsible traffic management. That “responsible traffic management” bit? Is a crock. Check out Ars Technica’s brilliant analysis of the supposed bandwidth crunch, which concludes that “[i]n fact, the Internet backbone has plenty of capacity.” I’m actually thrilled that Berkett has finally put the conversation back where it started: with thuggish threats by ISPs to shut out small content providers, skew the Internet toward the haves and away from the have-lesses, and obvious and revolting money-grubbing.

The concept of the tiered Internet has always been only marginally about traffic management based on actual need, and more about traffic management based on actual need to make more money. The incremental revenue you see gleaming in the telecoms’ eyes comes from two sources: charging content providers who already pay for their access to the pipes over and above that amount for “guaranteed delivery” of their merchandise; and second, from rolling out their own content delivery in the form of, in Virgin Media’s case, digital TV. All that content would, of course, have a gleaming and well-paved high-speed road right to your doorstep. It’s a butt-naked conflict of interest to want to shape the pipes in favor of some traffic when that traffic includes content you yourself provide, and it’s nothing but the sheerest greed to demand that you be paid by content providers for access to the backbone, by consumers for access to the content, and then by the content providers again so that consumers can have a guarantee of actually accessing the content.

Berkett’s attitude serves only to weaken the telecoms’ stance in the Net neutrality debate and, more importantly, might help us avoid potentially bad regulation by doing the one thing that will ensure a truly neutral Net: enraging the customer. Virgin Media is currently the second largest ISP in the UK. The BBC’s iPlayer is, near as I can tell, the most popular multimedia service in the UK. So, a simple thing has to happen here. The BBC tells Berkett where he can stick his “bus lane,” iPlayer starts stuttering and choking Virgin Media customers, and those customers suddenly find a happy new home elsewhere. Thanks, Berkett, for making everything that much easier.

Filed under: News, Rant, ISP, Net neutrality, Virgin Media