Virgin Media wants to control your internet use

That’s what the incoming CEO said in an interview, that anybody not willing to pay a premium –both customers and “content providers”– would be put in the “bus lanes”:

In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, far from covering up their intentions, Virgin Media’s new incoming CEO Neil Berkett – who joined the Virgin Media Board just a few days ago – has launched an attack on the ideas and principles behind net neutrality.

“This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks,” he said, adding that Virgin is already in the process of doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers.

With around 3.5 million customers in the UK, and already traffic shaping due to lack of capacity, it’s a sobering thought that at the behest of “content providers” with deep pockets, Virgin is prepared to speed up their traffic, which would presumably have a negative impact on those at the bottom of the ISP’s priority list, namely bandwidth hungry file-sharers.

Berkett then turned on the BBC and their iPlayer service, telling them – and other public broadcasters like them – that if they don’t pay a premium to gain faster access to Virgin Media’s customers, their service would be put into “bus lanes”.

Charlie Stross, currently an increasingly unhappy Virgin Media customer, meanwhile suspects it from deliberately looking for and disconnecting non-standard equipment after two Airport routers in a row gave the ghost but a pc with router software enable had no problems; talking to other customers showed the problem was widespread.

Finally Virgin Media is also deeply involved in the whole Phorm fiasco, the “let’s hijack our customers traffic to serve them ads” scheme that seemed deliberately designed not just to piss you off, but to make you extra vulnerable to all sorts of hacking attacks…

But it’s the dropping of net neutrality that’s potentially the greatest threat. The strenght of the internet has always been that once you’re online, you can get to everything equally well; you might pay extra to use a particular website, but not to get to that particular website. Without net neutrality, you’ll get something like this, your ISP deciding which websites you can and cannot visit and how fast.

So, if you’re on Virgin, now might be a good time to switch. IF you’re lucky enough to have them, try a smaller, local ISP as these tend to be less obnoxious, but always make sure to know what you’re getting into. Suggestions are welcome in comments.