Net Neutrality, Virgin Is Trying To Take It Away!

[Ikith]

http://stopvirgin.movielol.org/

The internet is our freedom as a world! Stop virgin from corrupting our tubes and favoring their partners! Boycott virgin products!

Virgin is trying to take away our freedom on the internet! They are trying to make it so people that pay them those companies web pages will load faster smoother and other websites will load slower and therefore no one will want to go to them! Its bullshit! Net Neutrality for the fucking win! FUCK YOU VIRGIN! EAT A DICK!

[Kurp]

Capitalism sucks.

(how many illegal Virgin albums/songs do you think those guys (or you) have on their ipods?)

[Norellicus]

Where have you been for the last year+ >_>

[Caiti]

Fairly sure I haven't spent money on any product affiliated with Virgin in 2years+ (although I'm not really sure how far they span) but sure, boycott go!

[Arcana]

Virgin pretty much owns the UK internet service, and have a tendancy to bottleneck the shit out of anyone who "abuses" their bandwidth I.E. downloading more than 1gb in an hour, they pretty much half your connection speed, sometimes worse.

This is just the next step for them, then comes their banhammering people who download anything.

[Lee]

Just like we demanded Freedom of the Seas, we should demand Freedom of the Nets.

[Amastacia]

There are upsides and downsides to net neutrality.

Isn't the first time, won't be the last time someone tries to make it go away.

The one bit that amuses me is that everyone seems to assume every SP would immediately fuck their entire customer base over should that come to pass. They run businesses, and alienating their subscribers doesn't keep revenue in the black.

[Maguspk]

Just like we demanded Freedom of the Seas, we should demand Freedom of the Nets.

If we can be free 11 miles into the ocean we should be free 11 minutes into the internet! Here here!

[sb]

Virgin isn't the only one that wants this. 2012 end of internet blah blah...

[Shuemue]

Virgin pretty much owns the UK internet service

Could you please explain this statement, with some evidence?

[Gulkeeva]

Uk not only wants to limit your downloads but limit your pr0ns too!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/19 ... _guidance/

[Shuemue]

Uh, unless I've missed something major in that article, they're just raising it from 16-17 yr old's being OK, to 18+ onry, in line with most nations, America in particular.

Edit: Okay I read a bit more, they're also tightening up on extreme BDSM (think pain olympics), bestiality and necrophilia. Sounds pretty reasonable still.

[Vigilia]

Virgin pretty much owns the UK internet service

Could you please explain this statement, with some evidence?

I'm confused as well, as far as I know, BT owns the entire telephone/cable network and any ISP is simply renting bandwidth from them. Virgin are pretty damn big, but they're hardly monopolizing.

[Shuemue]

Yep, Virgin do own a bunch of their own cabling, and they've installed some fiber, but in many areas Virgin rent their ADSL lines from BT Wholesale.

[Vigilia]

I was with Virgin for about four years until this spring. Me and my boyfriend aren't anywhere near huge downloaders, maybe one movie a month and rest of our internet usage is just FFXI and browsing. However, from around the time of WotG release last November we noticed a massive drop in connection speeds. First we thought it was just FFXI and SE dicking around because of all the patches but it kept getting worse and worse so after Christmas we started checking our speeds and sure enough we were getting about 150k during peak times, sometimes as low as 70k (wtf is this, 1992?), when we should had been on 3Mb ADSL.

Well I contacted Virgin and pretty much got a rant back from their customer services rep. Their story was basically that BT owns the entire network in our area (we live in the Midlands so it's not the utter sticks but nowhere near Greater London and T1 cables/fibres either) and in the last year or so Virgin's customer base has gone up so much that they can't provide the service they'd like to all their customers in our area within the bandwidth quota they can rent from BT. According to their words BT had promised to upgrade the network but so far nothing had been done and there was nothing Virgin could do to improve our connection speed. They waived the £150 disconnection and early contract termination fee without any argument and even recommended smaller providers for us or going with BT. So yeah, we're with a smaller provider now (fuck BT quite frankly) and I have nothing but nice things to say about Virgin's customer services.

Considering the limits on UK telephone/cable network at the moment and how utterly shitty it is for modern information technology's standards (go go post-war tubes) I can't but sort of understand what ISPs are trying to accomplish (if Virgin goes through with this plan others are guaranteed to follow) with giving better service to others while taking away from some but they're going at it from the completely wrong angle and just pissing everyone off. Since bandwidth is really that precious they should instead implement some kind of customer-based system where you yourself can limit your speeds to sites you aren't in a hurry to see much like when you set your download speeds on torrents. Granted there would be no extra money in that for ISPs so it's not going to happen.

[Gulkeeva]

Uh, unless I've missed something major in that article, they're just raising it from 16-17 yr old's being OK, to 18+ onry, in line with most nations, America in particular.

Edit: Okay I read a bit more, they're also tightening up on extreme BDSM (think pain olympics), bestiality and necrophilia. Sounds pretty reasonable still.

Pretty much down to "only" softcore porn apparently, can't have any form bondage, orgy etc.
Soorta remeinds me of that south park episodes with randy, where after he's seen so much extreme stuff, he can't jack off to playboy (which is kinda true!)

[Septimus]

Uh, unless I've missed something major in that article, they're just raising it from 16-17 yr old's being OK, to 18+ onry, in line with most nations, America in particular.

Edit: Okay I read a bit more, they're also tightening up on extreme BDSM (think pain olympics), bestiality and necrophilia. Sounds pretty reasonable still.

Pretty much down to "only" softcore porn apparently, can't have any form bondage, orgy etc.
Soorta remeinds me of that south park episodes with randy, where after he's seen so much extreme stuff, he can't jack off to playboy (which is kinda true!)

Wait wait wait... Now how many people in the British Government have died from Auto-erotic Asphyxiation in the last 25 years? Now those fuckers are trying to get rid of bondage on the net? What a bunch of fucking wankers.

[Galaika]

Virgin pretty much owns the UK internet service

Could you please explain this statement, with some evidence?

I'm confused as well, as far as I know, BT owns the entire telephone/cable network and any ISP is simply renting bandwidth from them. Virgin are pretty damn big, but they're hardly monopolizing.

Its because Virgin are the only ones who provide cable internet in the entire country, so if we want something better than shitty BT line-based ADSL we have to go with Virgin. I know after having cable and having ADSL, I'd never go back to ADSL,. However I started with NTL for my broadband, who at the time were competing with Telewest. Then those two merged, no competition any more but the service was still good. Since Virgin bought them the service has turned to shit. Yay for monopolies.

[Shuemue]

www.bethere.co.uk > cable

24mbit vs 20mbit

[Alleya]

There are upsides and downsides to net neutrality.

Isn't the first time, won't be the last time someone tries to make it go away.

The one bit that amuses me is that everyone seems to assume every SP would immediately fuck their entire customer base over should that come to pass. They run businesses, and alienating their subscribers doesn't keep revenue in the black.

Um...yes, that's exactly what they'll do. If the major companies start taking money to speed up certain sites and slow everything else, that's pretty much the entire internet, which means you'd have no bloody choice. Especially in non-urban areas where there's usually 1 cable and 1 DSL provider, but all they really do is re-sell bandwidth from the major companies. So yeah, they'd fuck the shit out of their customer base because their customer base has no choice but to take it. Then they make absolutely obscene amounts of money from charging outlandish prices for premium serving to major sites, effectively making it impossible for new ventures to start up without paying tribute to the Grand Internet Overlords, and the internet turns into microgoogleazontube and there's no more incentive to compete or innovate. Thank you congress for cleaning up our intertubes!

Plus there's other backdoor stuff...oh, we don't like this one site very much and so and so is paying us a LOT of money to make them go away, time to turn them down to 5bits/sec.