The Observer warns of UK net neutrality. I say bollocks

Here is a good example of the media trying to create a story from nothing.

The Net Neutrality debate is getting heated in the US. And since for some reason the UK media is obsessed with anything that happens in the US, newspapers have desperately been trying to draw a parallel between the US and the UK in order to run a story on it.

The Observer decided to make the jump and ran with this story yesterday: “Internet users face congestion charge — Britain ‘could be next’ as US businesses seek pay-for-speed scheme”.

The story tries it best. “Millions of people will be forced to pay a ‘congestion charge’ for sending email under plans being developed by American telephone companies to create a ‘two-tier’ internet.” And it talks to Deloitte’s analyst David Tansley who appears to give the article some legitimacy by saying, among other things: “The question is, how do you marshall a finite resource where demand exceeds supply? Do you just keep adding lanes to the motorway or do you look for a way of disincentivising some of the motorists? Unless you can defy the laws of physics, you have to consider a congestion charge. I think BT will do the same as the American telecoms companies.”

Unfortunately Mr Tansley is talking out of his hat. The reason why the UK will not be faced with the same net neutrality debate as in the US… No, in fact, the reason why there is even a net neutrality debate going on in the US is because the United States doesn’t have telephone exchanges.

In the UK and Europe, our systems were set up to have exchanges. This means that different companies can go into an exchange (well, they can once Ofcom has fought with BT over it) and stick in their equipment and offer different services to people on the other end.

In the US, these exchanges don’t exist and all the traffic is sent over a small number of telcos own lines. These companies all have opaque agreements between one another about taking other companies’ customers’ traffic and charge them according. These telcos have got together and realised that they can make alot more money by being allowed to have control over the content flowing down those pipes.

This has sparked a large group of people to campaign to get net neutrality written into the law, and that in turn has sparked a massive PR campaign by the telcos, 80 percent of which is bollocks but which nevertheless Mr Tansley appears to have bought into.

The telcos can draw up whatever economics they like to “prove” their case because they are the only ones that have access to how much everything costs.

There are three questions to ask:

1. Will this course of action provide the telcos with greater power?
2. Will this course of action provide the telcos with larger profits?
3. Have the fears put out by telcos been realised in other countries?

You won’t be surprised to know the answers are: yes, yes and no.

The last thing we need though is this sort of propaganda being promoted on this side of the Atlantic.