Virgin CEO says Net Neutrality is Bollocks

I had to double check it wasn't still April Fools day when I came across this comment on Boing Boing. I had to blog about this because I'm a Virgin customer and have watched their service go downhill since Virgin took over from Telewest/NTL. More has to be written about what Virgin are doing or nothing is going to change.

Already Virgin execute some brutal traffic shaping during peak hours and if they go ahead and start slowing down sites that wont pay directly to Virgin for extra bandwidth, the speed of access or even the possibility of access to Virgin customers will become much worse.

Here's an example if you're not up on Net Neutrality of what Virgin saying bollocks to it will mean.

You're trying to watch some show you missed in the BBC iPlayer, have it stream in the player which right now is possible at anytime of the day or night. If the BBC refuse to pay Virgin so people can continue to do this, Virgin will throttle your connection to the net whenever you use the BBC's services online. Best case scenario here is you get stuttery video streaming from the BBC during peak hours and the worse case scenario would give you no possibility of streaming at all.

This of course has ramifications that go way beyond streaming video from the beeb. This affects the whole internet and any website could be throttled back so it becomes sluggish to load or renders any services it offers unusable if said website refuses to pay to Virgin.

I'm disgusted with Virgin right now. I'm not quite ready to kill my account with them just yet because I live in hope that public opinion will stop this from happening but if they do go ahead with this, I'm gone.

I urge all to vote with their wallets on this one.