The “Break it Down” Blog

In the recent past it seems that Comcast has become the favorite ISP to hate with their constant manipulation of your traffic, illegal traffic tampering (OOPS, wait, nothing is illegal under Bush admin if done by a big enough corporation, full pardons all around!) and a general all around level of shit service… but it looks like they might have some competition in the space!

Virgin Media’s CEO a few weeks back make the comment that Net Neutrality was “bullocks”, more specifically:

The new CEO of Virgin Media is putting his cards on the table early, branding net neutrality ‘a load of bollocks’ and claiming he’s already doing deals to deliver some people’s content faster than others… If you aren’t prepared to cough up the extra cash, he says he’ll put you in the Internet ‘bus lane.’

So, THAT’S awesome, we thought we were still fighting the good fight, little did we know (like usual) that the fight never took place and the world continued on down the path of highest-profit without final oversight or input from the true idiots: the consumer.

It seems that Cory Doctorow, over at BoingBoing, is ripping up his Virgin Media contract because he feels that Virgin is violating their terms of service with this admittance. While I support the protest… good luck with that. Here, I’ll use my telepathic powers to tell the future for you:

Big Business: 1, Consumers: 0

Suck it, consumers!

The icing on the cake here is that Charlie Stross apparently did some analysis and is convinced that Virgin Media is already dropping packets of your traffic if a router (doing NAT I guess?) is detected on your home network.

So now it seems that someone has stepped up to the plate to race Comcast to the bowels of ISP-hell in an effort to claim the crown. I’m pretty pessimistic in general about what kind of service and what “Acceptable EULA terms” we are going to see here very shortly in our ISP contracts over the next 5 years.

Call me crazy, but I have a feeling these new terms are going to start to look a lot like something shoved right up our asses… with a requirement in the EULA that we love it of course