The VirginMedia Brand and Net Neutrality

IanFogg | April 16, 2008, 02:33 PM

So, net neutrality is bollocks? Virgin Media's CEO Neil Berkett sounds like he's a little out of his depth here. In Europe, bus lanes help buses go faster, as the lanes are less congested with other traffic, and not slower as he implies.

Worse, there is a knotty communications conundrum for ISPs here: For consumers, boosting one company's content delivery speeds, will look just the same as slowing or blocking others. Consumers will just see the difference in relative speeds. They will have no idea whether one content site is being degraded, or the other boosted, or whether both processes are taking place.

Also, taking payments from the content industry for higher quality and higher speed content delivery, damages ISPs' goal of being seen as just a mere carrier that is not responsible for what passes over their networks. This is a pandora's box of future problems for ISPs...

VirginMedia looks to have decided to go down this path: it's talking to Phorm on behavioural targeting; open to payments from content companies; is traffic shaping users heavilly to control its bandwidth costs; and is the lead UK ISP advocate of three strikes bans for persistent file sharers.

The problem for VirginMedia, is that these actions are at complete odds with its strategy of differentiating from other ISPs on broadband speeds as well as sitting extremely ill at ease with the Virgin brand.

VirginMedia is rapidly gaining a reputation as the friend of large companies, rather than the consumer champion that other Virgin-branded businesses have successfully positioned around in the past. So much store was placed on the Virgin name when ntl and Telewest switched brands in February last year that it's a travesty not to play to the brand's strengths as the consumer's friend.