BBC: "traffic management may sometimes be necessary"

 

In a recent blog post to the BBC site, Erik Huggers, claims that "Until that capacity is in place, the BBC recognises that traffic management may sometimes be necessary for technical reasons - for example to cope with legitimate network congestion. But this should be the exception. An emerging trend towards network operators discriminating in favour of certain traffic based on who provides it, as part of commercial arrangements, is a worrying development.". Seems like "compromise" is a good, politically correct approach recently (a la Verizon-Google - here).

See "Net Neutrality and the BBC" - here. 

The worrying development is "TalkTalk, BT: we'd put iPlayer in the slow lane"- here. " Asked specifically if TalkTalk would afford more bandwidth to YouTube than the BBC's iPlayer if Google was prepared to pay, the company's executive director of strategy and regulation, Andrew Heaney, argued it would be "perfectly normal business practice to discriminate between them". "We would do a deal and look at YouTube and look at the BBC, and decide," he added.

 

Back to BBC - "We've expressed this and other concerns to the industry regulator Ofcom and to the European Commission as part of their consultation on the issue. At this stage new legislation is not needed, since effective new EU rules have already been passed. But we do need the determination of regulators to now fully implement these rules, to prevent the emergence of practices which undermine the open internet which we so often take for granted"