Tag: UK Music

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Business Regs surveillance & privacy

UK Music piling on lobbying – DEAct consultations delayed

The consultation on the Initial Obligations Code required as part of the Digital Economy Act has been delayed. Originally due out at the end of July it missed this date and because it has to be issued whilst parliament is sitting was not therefore published during the summer break.

This is currently slipping week by week presumably whilst the government tries to make its mind up regarding the content.  I am also told that potentially the Cost Sharing part of the DEAct might need to be referred to the European Commission which would mean a three month delay. It looks likely that the launch of the Code of Practice which has to be done in January 2011 will be a softly softly low key affair. I can’t imagine that the CoP will be in a usable state at that time.

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broadband Business internet online safety piracy Regs

UK Government Efforts ISP Regulation Gets Opposition from Unexpected Sources

There has been a lot in the press recently regarding Government plans to regulate the ISP industry. ISPs have been vociferous where they consider that this regulation is unnecessary and adds cost burdens that will have to be borne by consumers.

Quite pleasingly other industries which the Government is likely to think would be the beneficiaries of the legislation have also come out against it.

For example the high profile “three strikes” approach to Music Piracy whereby persistent file-sharers have their broadband cut off is attracting a lot of opposition from the music industry itself. The BBC reports:

Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien, a member of the Featured Artists’ Coalition (FAC), said: “It’s going to start a war which they’ll never win.”

Feargal Sharkey’s UK Music allegedly has a war chest of up to £20 million a year to lobby Government on the subject of ISP regulation. This FAC stance seems to be clear disagreement within that industry.

The leak in the Independent this week that the Queen’s Speech currently is planned to propose mandatory blocking of consumer broadband connections for child abuse images has also created a bit of a stir.

The vast majority of consumer broadband connections already have such screening and it seems that the Government is trying to make political capital out of a subject which everyone will of course support in principle.

The issue is how much effort and money will it take to cover the last few consumers not already “protected” particularly as it is smaller ISPs who are most likely to be affected. This is particularly relevant considering that all we are not talking about stopping hard core child abusers who already know how to get around the blocking.

The Register has come out with an interview on this subject with Jim Gamble, Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), and effectively the UK’s leading investigator of online child abuse who has come out against legislation in this area.

There is potentially a lot more regulation in the pipeline. Somewhere in a Government office near you someone is plotting to gain more control ever our every day lives. It is at least nice to see that there are people out there with some common sense who are willing to stick their hands up and say “this is not right”.

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Business internet media piracy

ISP and Music industries meet at UK Summit

At the board room of the Performing Rights Society in London today the great and the good of the UK Music industry met with representatives from the mainstream ISP community for an open discussion on how to handle illegal P2P music downloading.

Organisations represented included UK Music,  BAC&S, PPL, PRS, MMF, MPA, MU, MCPS, MPG, Timico, ISPA, O2, Orange, AOL, Yahoo, BT, GlobalMix, LINX, Playlouder and KCom. I’m sure I’ve missed some out and you will have to work out for yourselves what some of the acronyms stand for.

I was essentially there on behalf of the Internet Service Providers’ Association to represent the smaller ISP community who have been left out of the talks up until now. Whilst the “big six” largest ISPs probably represent over 90% of the market the other ISPs, of which there are easily in excess of 300, do represent a “significant other”.

As much as anything the meeting was a “getting to know each others’ perspective” session but a few points in particular stuck in my mind.

  1. We were not allowed to discuss commercial issues and there was a lawyer sat in the corner who interrupted whenever the conversation moved towards this area – the concern being that nobody wanted the meeting to be seen as price fixing. I understand that any initiatives up until now have failed because the Music Industry can’t agree on prices that will allow ISPs to make money out of offering legal music download services. 
  2. It was suggested by yours truly that to make the whole business model work there needed to be a wholesale provider that would make it easier for smaller businesses to participate.  This wholesale provider would have sorted out the rats nest of copyright and licensing issues. Some larger ISPs had 5 corporate lawyers in a department exclusively dedicated to this area. What hope the rest of us!

There is clearly some way to go to get to a working solution although there was general agreement around the table that  everybody wanted to help.

ISPs present were asked whether P2P traffic caused problems for them on their network. I stated that typically B2B ISPs did not throttle P2P traffic  and customers were provided with a high quality experierience for which they paid a premium.

In the consumer space customers seem not prepared to pay for quality and thus in order to try and preserve a reasonable experience for “ordinary” applications such as browsing and email  it is often standard practice for ISPs to throttle P2P traffic. In fact in fairness some ISPs publish these policies on their website. This touched a nerve with one Tier 1 ISP who avoided the word throttling using, instead,  “traffic management” as a less contentious phrase.

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Business internet

Anti-P2P Piracy Regulation Likely To Be Imposed On ISPs?

The UK Government has stirred up the industry today with a press release by the Department of Business, Enterprise And Regulatory Reform (BERR) that intimates it’s intention to regulate ISPs into assisting the music industry to combat illegal downloading.

BERR is saying that last year’s consultation with stakeholders (ISPs and music industry) showed that there is no consensus on how to address the problem and the suggestion is that it sees regulation as being necessary. The whole subject matter, however, is riddled with complexity.

In 2008 the music industry, under a new representative body known as UK Music, run by former pop star  Feargal Sharkey, began discussions with what are known as the “Big Six” ISPs. These are the large branded ISPs that actually represent the majority of the consumer broadband customers in the UK. These discussions were held in private and the rest of the industry has not been party to what was actually being said. My understanding is that the discussions centred purely around enforcement and have not gone particularly well.

The problems centre around being able to prove who is doing the downloading and what is being downloaded – most ISPs can’t tell and have no interest – this surely is a privacy issue. Then there are the costs of policing and finally the fact that none of the ISPs want to lose customers.

At the ISP Conference in London last November I sat on a panel with Feargal Sharkey to discuss this whole issue. At that time we arranged to meet again in the New Year so that the other , smaller, UK ISPs, represented by the ISP Association of which I am a council member could participate in the discussion. That meeting is scheduled for 9th February. So the position taken by BERR is in my view somewhat premature as discussions between stakeholders do not yet appear to me to have  finished.

The nature of talks now is centred around licensing and revenue models. There have been some high profile announcements recently where some big consumer ISPs have severed their contractual relationships with music content providers. This is being done because the existing business models do not work. For example music streaming is licensed on a per stream basis. As the number of streams grow ISPs have to increase their capacity to measure and account for them and the cost of doing so soon outweighs the income derived from selling access to the music. 

So they have to look for an alternative. The strong rumour is that a big UK ISP has already negotiated a deal whereby it can sell unlimited access to music for a fixed monthly fee per subscriber (word on the street is that this is  BT though there has been no offical acknowledgement of this fact).

The meeting on the 9th February is likely to centre around how other ISPs can adopt the same model to everyone’s mutual benefit. From the ISP industry perspective it makes more sense to make music easy to access legally than to drag everyone into complex legal processes which will only benefit lawyers in the long run.

BERR is also now saying that this subject area is also now going to be taken under the wing of the Digital Britain Review, the interim report for which is due out at the end of this month. I am not convinced that this interim report will show much progress. The likelihood is that another consultation will happen in the summer with a target date for legislation in the autumn.

This timetable, I believe, does not really provide enough time for sensible consideration of the legislation and if I were the Government would not want to be getting into an unpopular debate with industry in the run up to the election. There is a feeling on the ISP streets that the government is now looking to come up with some good news stories to take them through 2009 and into a notional spring General Election in 2010.

Time will tell, and soon enough. I will continue to report and comment on this subject. This post is a little longer than usual but there is a lot to talk about.

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Business internet

ISP Conference Notes – Illegal P2P Music Downloads

As heralded I spoke at the Annual ISP Conference in London yesterday. An amazing mix of organisations were represented including ISPs, content providers, mobile operators, security companies, NGOs, charities, government departments and universities. I’m sure I’ll have missed out some group :-).

My session was with Fergal Sharkey, erstwhile lead singer of the Undertones but now CEO of UK Music and representative of the music industry in the UK. In a nutshell the ISP industry has not hitherto concerned itself with what is going on with illegal P2P music downloading, other than in some highly publicised and much criticised cases of throttling the ADSL connections of heavy users.

The mood is changing with both music industry and ISPs getting together to try and come up with a solution that suits both parties. This is the scoop:

  • It costs money for ISPs to police illegal downloads.
  • Legal music downloading removes some of the distribution costs that used to exist in the record industry
  • There must be a way of recompensing ISPs for their work in assisting the music industry.

This process began recently with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the largest six ISPs and UK Music. The “big six” represent a high proportion of UK broadband consumers. The concern amongst the other ISPs that actually represent the majority of the service providers, if not the largest subscriber base, is that the big six will opt for a solution that is good for them but not actually sensible for smaller organisations.

An example would be if they decided to implement technical approaches that suit larger organisations but may be impractical in smaller ones.

The upshot is that Timico was invited to participate in the debate along with the Internet Service Providers’ Association to represent the smaller stakeholders. More as it happens…

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Business internet ofcom

ISPA Conference

Another busy week in prospect starting on Monday with the ISPA conference in the City of London. This is an annual event where the industry gets together to debate “commercial and regulatory issues of today and tomorrow”.

I’m on at 14.00 on a panel that discusses how ISPs can work in harmony with content providers. Other panelists are Feargal Sharkey of UK Music, Jeremy Olivier of Ofcom and Steve Purdham of We7, a music download business that was co-founded by Peter Gabriel.

This is a pretty hot topic at the moment, not only because of how piracy is hurting the music industry but also because of the pressure that legal download sources such as BBC iPlayer is placing on both ISP networks and margins.