The UK’s two biggest ISPs have revealed that they are prepared to give priority to certain internet apps or services if companies were to pay them to do so.
Speaking at a Westminster eForum on net neutrality, senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals, PC Pro reports.
Asked specifically if TalkTalk would afford more bandwidth to YouTube than the BBC’s iPlayer if Google was prepared to pay, the company’s executive director of strategy and regulation, Andrew Heaney, argued it would be “perfectly normal business practice to discriminate between them”.
“We would do a deal and look at YouTube and look at the BBC, and decide,” he added.
When asked the same question, BT’s director of group industry policy, Simon Milner, replied: “We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts,” although he added BT had never received such an approach.
The ISPs’ stance was tacitly backed by regulator Ofcom, which has just completed a consultation on net neutrality. “We see real economic benefit for a two-sided market to emerge, especially for markets such as IPTV,” said Alex Blowers, international director of Ofcom, though he insisted ISPs must be transparent with customers about such arrangements.
Ofcom’s consumer representatives were less enamoured with the prospect of ISPs giving some services preferential treatment.
“Public services could be positively discriminated against, especially if they’re high bandwidth,” said Anna Bradley, chair of the Communications Consumer Panel. “It may be that we need to consider some sort of ‘must carry’ obligation,” for public-funded services such as the iPlayer and Government-run sites, Bradley added.
Barry Collins [photo: Crossed wires by Howard Lake; some rights reserved]
