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.

1st Blog, this could get ugly

The thief, the dog, his owner and their blog.

Pure jealousy drove me to create this. I think that's the best way to start, be honest from the word go and see where it takes me. Why jealousy? Because everyone but me has one of these Blogs on the Interweb. So call it peer group pressure on a global scale.

Dogs drink coffee too

Blogger seems to think the word blog is not spelled correctly which amuses me, but that isn't important right now. What is important is believing that the entire world will be reading this, even if in reality it will only be my dog glancing at it as she hangs around guiltily waiting for a chance to stick her nose into my coffee.

Ninjas have Roms?

So why NinjaRom you're all asking? Well, apart from it rhyming really nicely with dot com, making it read well as a member of any website (say, ninjarom . midgetfetish . com for example) I'm really most proud of the name because it satisfies my need for a nerdy name that will immediately put everyone off focusing any attention on me unless you love Ask a Ninja and read tech sites like tomshardware for fun. Of course I'm alienating a large population of hot ladies who might be asking, do Ninjas have Roms? This is the price I must pay to satisfy my inner geek.

Can I come back tomora?

I think thats enough blogging for one day. It's time to put some more icons on my USB thumb drive, taking advantage of the low latency speed they offer over cranky old hard drives. It's a nerd thing but like Tom Hanks said, "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when you'll be taken out silently by a Ninja while eating one"

- NinjaRom