Well, I think there's a number of things we need to tease apart
when we think about Net Neutrality.
There's the fundamental arguments about what that means
in a technical sense, we could look at that.
And there's the context in which people legislate for Net Neutrality,
which is done on a per-country basis,
and the way it fits into each country's legislation which leads to some of the slightly weird arguments that you hear.
So I think if we start with the technicals, that's where I'm safest.
I mean, the idea of Net Neutrality is that you shouldn't discriminate on the basis of
you know, where IP packets come from, so what server you're talking to or who the client is
and you shouldn't discriminate on the basis of the protocol being used.
Now we've seen this a number of times, we've seen
certain sites getting slowed down because, well, we don't like what they're doing.
and this is the argument that Net Neutrality advocates would have which is that...
it can't be at the whim of a commercial provider, a service provider, to favour some website over another.
And it's particularly the case that there's a concern that
For example, ISP's might be able to favour
some websites over others by asking people to pay for preferential access.
So, you know, 'Large Company A' pays the internet service provider to make sure that their websites fastest
and that's considered a disadvantage when it comes to innovation,
because obviously small, new, interesting start-ups
wouldn't have the budget to be able to go in and pay those extra premiums.
And, in fact, you know, there's good arguments here about
much innovation has happened on the internet.
We have seen lots of small companies grow into really big companies on the internet in a short time,
and, we do have to remember that Amazon and E-Bay used to be
minnows compared to what was out there.
But things like WhatsApp and Instagram
you know, if the likes of Facebook
or even before that - If Myspace had been able to buy bandwidth
and hence discriminate
against Facebook, then Facebook wouldn't have risen
These are arguments that could be had about the importance for the openness of innovation.
So that's about discriminating based on the service, or the IP address.
There's also discrimination by protocol, and this was quite popular for a number of years
because certain protocols came to the attention of the service providers because
they were consuming lots of bandwidth, particularly file sharing.
Now,
whether the ISP's took a moral stance on this and said that
file sharing is wrong because it can only ever be used for breach of copyright
or whether they simply took the view that, well,
we don't have enough bandwidth to go around
and these are heavy users
and they are ruining it for everyone else.
Um...
It didn't really matter, but they started discriminating against that and BitTorrent was the classic
where lots of people were discriminating against BitTorrent.
And then, of course, it turns out that many people were using BitTorrent for perfectly legitimate reasons.
Yes there were bit torrent file sharing, and there still is - there's plenty of it around
Um... and uh..
but then World of Warcraft uses BitTorrent
to update it's very big patches.
Very useful it is too because that means that
in the days that my kids used to play World of Warcraft as well
we only had to download one patch to the host and then it replicated inside the host so
there's perfectly good reasons.
Discriminating against protocols is a very blunt instrument
because you have no idea what people are using it for
in reality.
So there's some of the arguments about Net Neutrality.
There's always the case that service providers have the right to engage in certain
traffic management, even where there is strong Net Neutrality law
in order to keep the network operating. So, for example:
during a distributed denial-of-service attack
one of the things that lots of the ISP's do
is they will shut down where the attacks are coming from,
and they will throttle them. So you couldn't say that that's a bad thing.
And likewise, as we already know, it's only in the UK,
but elsewhere,
there are varying degrees of blacklisting of websites,
some of it because the material is clearly illegal.
Others, for example, certain countries have a list of
sites reckoned to have adult content
and while not illegal
many countries have put in place legislation that says
that consumers need to opt-in to see that
rather than opt-out.
So, there is filtering going on. There are times when ISP's need to do things.
And so, it really is about getting a sort of rational balanced view
on the technical side about promoting innovation
and not allowing incumbents to basically just hold on to their business
because they're the ones with the deep pockets.
I think many people would view that as being critical to the success of the internet.
So that's sort of the technicals. And that the -
what these Net Neutrality don't discriminate based on protocols or sources.
Um,
but then we get into a lot of the arguments that are going on right at the moment
in particular with the F.C.C.
is really about, previously, the way in which it was decided that they would try to enforce Net Neutrality.
which was to use a particular piece of prior legislation
that had been used to regulate phone companies for many years.
And this leads to lots of arguments
which, in a sense, are to do with the details of that legislation
and not to do with, really, this issue of Net Neutrality.
Buried in the legislation is the requirement for universal service revision and the ability to essentially,
tax all the consumers a small amount
in order to make sure you can deliver service everywhere.
And that was very important. The universal service revision for telephony
was a major thing,
80 years ago or something.
Which was to make sure everyone could get a phone since it was considered critical
especially since we started moving to emergency services available by phone
and the ability - in our case in the UK - to make 999 calls
at any time. And indeed we see that today.
You see it on your mobile phone. You can always make emergency calls.
Embedded in that legislation, you know, things were there for a perfectly sensible reason,
but it's now being used as a bit of a bogey man. To say that well, in the future
under the current U.S. legislation in the U.S.
government could decide that these ISP's,
most of them being these enormous tax levies,
and that's being used as to why we can't possibly have this legislation on the vote.
'Cause that's got nothing to do with anyone else anywhere else in the world.
There's a very specific argument within the U.S.
And so we need to tease apart those issues
that are to do with the underlying philosophy of Net Neutrality
and its, you know, enabling innovation
from the very specifics of what happens in any given country.
So, again, we look at some other countries
I mean, E.U. has put in place legislation on Net Neutrality.
Although there are some people that are concerned there's like loopholes there
because in Portugal at least one provider is charging differentially for different services.
And that's viewed as, perhaps, not in the spirit of what the legislation was meant to achieve,
but on the other hand, it is legal,
so they can currently do it under E.U. law.
And there's other, you know, other countries have looked at this in different ways
India certainly - I was very concerned at some of the proposals around
sort of, free internet access for certain websites sponsored by certain large companies
would essentially prevent any indigenous service provision.
You know, social media provision in particular coming forward.
So that's - we're going to look at each country in turn, try to understand what is really going on
And the question is of course, could the change in the position in the U.S.
radically effect anyone else outside the U.S.?
I mean most of this really reflects around
the consumer internet service provider.
I will not transit the U.S. consumer networks in order to get to the services
even if I'm in the UK or elsewhere in Europe
or anywhere else in the world.
We're going to some large server farm somewhere.
The chances are we don't necessarily traverse those networks
So far a lot of people it wouldn't make any difference
but then actually we need to look more generally
at the way in which large scale servers are deployed these days.
Most of your streaming video comes from a content delivery network
where the content has been replicated all around the planet.
And the fact that, you know, in the UK
large amounts of our content will be coming
across the very narrow pond to Republic of Ireland.
We'll be getting all of our content from there, if it's not already in the UK.
Then in fact, what the U.S. does, and what U.S. carriers do in the U.S.
will have absolutely zero effect on us what-so-ever.
The danger always is, though, that the U.S.
even though the government structure and everything else for the internet has changed over the years
the U.S. is still seen as such a leader in this area
and one of the concerns that many folks have is that
if they start going down this path, how many other people will think it's acceptable to go down that path?
Although I have to say, given that the E.U. in particular has put in place legislation
then I don't see us doing a U-turn on that.
If by us I mean those of us currently in Europe.
Let's see where Brexit takes us
with that legislation in the future.
(People pay for services they want, they usually pay more if they want a better service, right?)
(What's different about this rollback of Net Neutrality in those terms?)
Well,
yeah, the world is full of, you know, first class seats in planes and business class
and primo-economy and economy, and people paying different prices for different things.
And you have in the internet world you would say that
there are different tower of structures available.
Primarily, and here I can only really speak for the UK,
primarily simply based on our volume
so it's not about discriminating one against the other,
one service against the other, but simply by volume, so people will buy
- I think I have -
4GBs a month on my phone at the moment
I have depending on my usage.
I have to have no limits at home because I simply cannot
control what amount of content that,
you know, knowing that I have two grown (laughing) -
grown lads at home streaming videos all the time and playing online games,
we would blast through any cap that anyone would want to put on us.
So there is that, differential pricing for different services,
and it's viewed as
just a very un-internet thing to do.
To differentiate between the services
I think that's slightly different from having
you know, tiered prices
which simply reflects the amount of resource you are using on the network,
and perhaps that's where it really comes down to.
Is that, you know, a packet is a packet.
I mean,
yes, many of the ISP's
would like to look at some of those packets
and go, "That content is of higher value,
and someone is making money out of it. Why aren't we getting a piece of the action?"
You know, that's a very natural commercial behavior.
But, um,
we don't charge deferentially for a kilogram parcel, depending on what the contents are.
I mean, maybe you pay the insurance, but the actual carriage is the same.
So, it's the same principle here:
it shouldn't be that the content is the thing,
which is either the service or the protocol,
should dictate these things are different
'cause bits is bits is bits.
It's like, it's just like how many of them do I want to move?
And I think if we stick with that,
then - that general principle -
with the exceptions I mentioned about, you know, defending the network against attacks
and other scenarios that are perfectly valid
for, as I say, an operator to manage their network;
let's stick with that principle then.
You know, that seems reasonably sensible.
The basis on which many view the internet of having been a great success.