Media Wonk

ISPs vs. BBC: The shape of things to come? - August 13, 2007

While the “net neutrality” debate in the U.S. has remained largely confined to regulatory filings and the occasional Congressional oversight hearing, it has burst into the open in the U.K.

Over the weekend, the Financial Times reported that a group of ISPs is making noises about having to restrict subscribers’ access to the BBC’s planned iPlayer on-demand video service (currently in beta) due to pressure the services is expected to put on available network bandwidth.

“The internet was not set up with a view to distributing video,” Tiscali UK chief executive Mary Turner told FT.  “We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite. If the iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the internet will get very slow service and will call their ISPs to complain.”

Much gnashing of teeth ensued, and one of the ISPs named in the piece, BT, has since issued a statement distancing itself somewhat from the issue. But the battle is now fully joined, and it won’t be long before its echoes cross the Great Pond to the US.

When they do, they will inevitably end up shaping how the net neutrality debate plays out here, and probably not for the better.

By going Ed Whitacre one-better--and threatening to degrade the quality of an existing application unless the BBC ponies up for more capacity--the ISPs have tried to turn the net neutrality debate essentially into an argument over the cost of bandwidth and who should bear it. As a regulatory strategy, it’s likely to prove irresistible to American ISPs.

The real issue is not the raw cost of bandwidth. Neither the British ISPs, nor their American counterparts, are likely keen to start building a lot of new capacity in any case, no matter who pays for it.

They’d both get far more bang for their buck (or quid), and much faster, by “shaping” the flow of bits over their existing networks, such as by sorting them into tiers. Packets on some tiers would get fast tracked, those on others wouldn’t. Bandwidth gets used “more efficiently,” and the ISPs can then charge either users or content providers (or both) according to the tier of service they want.

Although still limited here (though probably not for long), many European ISPs already deploy traffic-shaping technology to prioritize content from specific types of applications, such as VoIP. Extending that capability to prioritize (or not) peer-to-peer video applications such as iPlayer, would be relatively straight-forward.

The use of such application-specific traffic-shaping, however, obviously raises a host of important public policy questions that go to the real heart of the net neutrality debate, but which the ISPs would much-prefer not to have to deal with, at least in public: Could such real-time management of network traffic be used to discriminate against or favorite specific content or applications? Could it be used to restrict certain kinds of speech? How would users’ privacy be safeguarded when traffic to and from their IP addresses is being actively “shaped?” What could be done with that data? Would new, disruptive applications be able to gain access to the network? Etc., etc.

Lucky for the ISPs, then, that most policy makers would rather not have to confront those questions, either. Neither the regulatory nor legislative process in this country—as they currently operate—is very amenable to confront such fundamental questions on their merits. You make too many enemies and not enough friends that way.

Both regulators and lawmakers are much more comfortable simply brokering or blessing self-serving deals between competing economic interests. In Washington-speak, it’s called “letting the market decide.”

Insofar as the ISPs can turn the net neutrality debate into a classic Washington contest between competing economic interests, they’re likely to get a sympathetic hearing, both on the Hill and at the FCC.

But it won’t do much for the rest of us.

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