Digital Britain report says bandwidth-hungry services must pay up

Services like the BBC’s iPlayer will be forced to pay ISPs to deliver their traffic if a recommendation from yesterday’s Digital Britain report is upheld.

Speaking to parliament yesterday, Lord Carter, the Communications Minister said that ISPs should be given the freedom to charge for prioritising types of traffic. If this was to go ahead, websites that broadcast bandwidth-demanding services, such as video streams, will have to pay a tidy sum to make sure that there services were available to view at fast enough rate rate. Of course, without paying for this privilege their site visitor rate would drop off if the content was too slow to view.

The report wasn’t the best example of great, well-written pitch, but speaking on the topic of prioritised internet content, it mentioned: “Ofcom has in the past acknowledged the claims in the debate but have also acknowledge [sic] that ISPs might in future wish to offer guaranteed service levels to content providers in exchange for increased fees.”

So, in summary – on the one hand the Digital Britain report made a song and dance about “net neutrality” and then pledge to potentially take away UK customers’ valued services like TV streaming. Needless to say, Lord Carter’s speech has been met with sceptical reception.