[vidarh]

In particular it's worth noting that some providers wanted to make net neutrality an issue in the UK: In particularly once iPlayer launched, they were wildly unhappy with the traffic the BBC "caused".

But they were in the unhappy position (for the ISPs, not users) that if they started negatively affecting iPlayer, their customers would have plenty of choice.

The comical part of that whole affair was that they should have cheered the BBC on:

Bandwidth used for iPlayer was bandwidth they could get incredibly cheaply simply by peering with the BBC [1] at a range of public peering points or even directly, and bandwidth end-users used to get at iPlayer content would be bandwidth they wouldn't use to stream over far more expensive routes.

Of course, the reason they were whining was that many of them had severely underdimensioned their backhaul networks to their core networks compared to the speeds they were actually selling to their customers, so in the short run it drove up costs, but in the long run the larger market share the BBC and other domestic streaming providers have, the better, for the above reason.

[1] https://support.bbc.co.uk/support/peering/

[hugofirth]

Huh - I was vaguely aware of the uproar about iPlayer in the early days, but I had no idea the BBC did peering agreements. This was fascinating, thank you :)