Virgin CEO claims “Net Neutrality is a load of bollocks!”
Forget all the arguments, both for and against, which you’ve heard before about Net Neutrality, it’s all a load of bollocks. Not my words, but the words of Virgin media’s new Chief Executive Neil Berkett.
Net Neutrality, the concept that networks should be free of restrictions, in content and distribution, is a hot topic for discussion at the moment, with the revelation that American ISP Comcast is throttling BitTorrent traffic, and the ongoing fight between the BBC and several British ISPs over who should pay for the extra bandwidth taken up by the iPlayer.
Virgin Media, currently (but hopefully not for much longer), the second largest ISP in the UK, has already shown their lack of support for the concepts of privacy, by being the first ISP to adhere to the British Government’s wishes and police what their subscribers use the Net for.
Now, according to TorrentFreak, the new CEO of the company, who only joined the board three days ago, has eloquently expressed his view on the mater of Net Neutrality.
In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, he said:
“This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks.”
Well, it’s one way of looking at such a complicated issue I suppose.
He then went on to claim that his company is already doing deals which will speed up access for certain media providers, while crippling others.
It seems content providers such as the BBC have a clear cut decision to make with Virgin Media – pay a premium for faster access, or be shafted. The way Berkett put it was to threaten the BBC and similar providers with getting put in slow moving “bus lanes”.
At least he’s being honest with his intentions I suppose, but that’s not much comfort for the content providers, or the 3.5 million Virgin customers who could find certain services moving at a snail’s pace because their ISP wants to make as much profit as possible.
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April 14th, 2008
Link to interview: http://www.katebulkley.com.nyud.net:8080/18-19neil_berkett.pdf