Guardian Article - Net Neutrality

Berners-Lee warns ISPs on net neutrality
Inventor of world wide web says plans for 'two-speed' internet go against its principles

Article history

The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has warned internet service providers (ISPs) that plans for a "two-speed" internet go against the principles that have let the net grow so rapidly in the past two decades.

"Best practices should also include the neutrality of the net," Berners-Lee told a round table in Westminster on Wednesday morning, convened by the communications minister Ed Vaizey. Content companies, represented by Facebook, Skype, the BBC and Yahoo, squared up to ISPs, with input from consumer representatives including the Open Rights Group, the Consumers' Association and the communications regulator Ofcom.

Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, who was representing consumer interests at the meeting, said afterwards that he was concerned about the direction the debate was going: "The potential for something going terribly wrong is absolutely there. The regulator and government do not wish to intervene, for good reason; but industry is not putting forward anything that looks like meaningful self-regulation."

ISPs have for years sought to charge the BBC or customers, or both, for the huge amounts of data transferred over their networks by applications such as the iPlayer, whose popularity has exploded in the past few years. ISPs have to pay for carriage of data from BT's core network to customers, but offer unmetered services on broadband – meaning that when people's demand for data grows, ISPs can be out of pocket.

But the BBC and other content providers such as YouTube have resisted calls that they should pay, on the basis that they are providing a service that allows the ISPs to find customers. In response, ISPs both in the US and Europe have mooted the idea of "two-tier" connections where some services are slower than others. Skype complained at the meeting that its service is effectively blocked on all of the mobile services in the UK except 3, meaning that carriers are violating the principle of net neutrality because they fear it will affect their call revenues.

Berners-Lee told the meeting that "every customer should be able to access every service, and every service should be able to access every customer ... The web has grown so fast precisely because we have had two independent markets, one for connectivity, and the other for content and applications."

Vaizey said the meeting had been "useful and productive" and that "it was important to discuss how to ensure the internet remains an open, innovative and competitive place."

"Net neutrality" – in which services are treated exactly equally as they pass over the net, no matter what their source or destination – has become an increasingly vexed topic as demands on ISPs and mobile carriers have begun to outstrip capacity.

ISPs have thus suggested that they should be allowed to manipulate the transfer of data, but that they would be transparent about how and what they were doing.

On Monday the Broadband Stakeholder Group launched a new traffic management transparency code, which has since been signed by the largest fixed-line and mobile carriers, including BSkyB, BT, Everything Everywhere (formerly Orange and T-Mobile), TalkTalk, 3, Virgin Media and Vodafone. Together they represent more than 90% of all fixed-line broadband and mobile customers in the UK.

It pledges that "information will be provided in a common format to explain what traffic management techniques are used, when and with what impact for each broadband service currently marketed by the code's signatories."

But Rob Reid, senior policy adviser at the Consumers' Association, who was among the attendees at the meeting, said that there was concern that transparency was only one half of the required commitment – because users might be tied into contracts lasting 18 months or more, meaning that if they disliked a change to the traffic management policy it would be expensive to switch to a different provider who offered one they preferred.

Antony Walker, the chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, told the Guardian: "The issue of [customer] switching is critical. It's the other side of the coin to transparency. Ofcom is working on guidance on this and it is an issue that was highlighted. Everybody agrees that it is important."

Adding faster systems would only work as a short-term measure to relieve congestion on networks, said Walker: "it's like adding more lanes to the M25 – it just attracts more cars. Having faster networks will mean that people will want more services using more data."

But Killock said that not enough was being done yet: "In contrast with the US, where rules are being put in place through the Federal Communications Commission, or Norway where ISPs have agreed a meaningful code, our ISPs are not offering us what we and the UK economy needs. If that continues to be the case, then Ed Vaizey will find himself with the task of breaking the log jam."