Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media, says so. ‘Net neutrality’ is one of the “hot” concepts of the moment in internet discussion forums. If we understand correctly, the defenders of a ‘neutral net’ advocate for a network that does not discriminate between users or uses. The electricity grid could be a good example of a neutral network, since it doesn’t matter to this network whether you plug in a toaster or a computer, or what you do with these devices. Here
Tim Wu
, one of the precursors of the concept, explains it in a much more enlightening way.
What Virgin Media, the second largest internet provider in the United Kingdom with approximately 3.6 million customers, wants to do is negotiate with certain content providers to pay for higher download speeds. Thus, for example, Berkett threatened the BBC itself regarding its online video service
iPlayer
, with delivering its content at the speed of a “bus line” if they did not enter the Virgin subscriber base. If this can happen to a public company like the BBC, what will happen to the thousands of users who share files through P2P networks? Will we have downloads at scooter speed?
(Via TorrentFreak)