Berners-Lee to advise on UK net-neutrality code

The government convened a net-neutrality-related roundtable event on Wednesday involving ISPs, content providers, consumer groups and father-of-the-web Tim Berners-Lee.

It was announced at the event that Berners-Lee will work with industry body the Broadband Stakeholder Group to expand its voluntary code of practice, which was unveiled on Monday. The code, to which most big ISPs and mobile operators have signed up, compels those companies to be transparent about their traffic management policies in an easy-to-understand way — Sir Tim wants the commitment to extend to other aspects of net neutrality.

"While transparency about traffic management policy is a good thing, best practices should also include the neutrality of the net," Berners-Lee said in a statement. "The web has grown so fast precisely because we have had two independent markets, one for connectivity, and the other for content and applications."

Communications minister Ed Vaizey, whose Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) organised the occasion, described it as "useful and productive".

"I am pleased that someone with the expertise of Sir Tim has agreed to work with industry on expanding that agreement to cover managing and maintaining the open internet," Vaizey said.

"That agreement should be guided by three simple principles. The first is users should be able to access all legal content. Second, there should be no discrimination against content providers on the basis of commercial rivalry and finally traffic management policies should be clear and transparent. The internet has brought huge economic and social benefits across the world because of its openness and that must continue."

Vaizey's words did not carry the government position on net neutrality much past that which he had already laid out — namely, that it would prefer to avoid regulation on the matter until a real problem manifests itself. It addressed the potential issue of a content provider paying an ISP to downgrade rival content providers' services, but that is not really a scenario that has been much discussed — at least in public — in any case.

What has been proposed, many times, is that ISPs charge content providers to ensure their services run at a guaranteed quality. ZDNet UK asked the DCMS on Thursday what its attitude would be to such arrangements, and a spokesman said the department "wouldn't intervene".

"The difference would be that if you come to an agreement for a guaranteed level of service then the knock-on impact would be on the internet as a whole, not a specific group of content providers," the DCMS spokesman said. "[Vaizey] is saying there's no way you should be able to get an ISP to run your rival's service slower. It's about specifically targeting your rivals."

According to the DCMS, attendees at the roundtable included: Amazon, the BBC, the Broadband Stakeholder Group, BSkyB, BT, the CBI, Channel 4, Channel 5, Consumer Focus, eBay, Everything Everywhere, Facebook, the Federation of Communications Services, Google, ISPA, ITV, the Mobile Broadband Group, Nominet, Ofcom, the Open Rights Group, Skype, TalkTalk, the Tax Payers Alliance, 3, Virgin Media, Vodafone, the W3C, WE7, Which? and Yahoo.