Well, a practice that got Canadian ISPs into hot water recently seems to have jumped the pond.
From Boing Boing:
Bell Canada, the national Canadian telcom, has been caught filtering P2P connections initiated by customers of its reseller ISPs — that means that if you start a funky little ISP in Toronto and buy a giant fat industrial pipe from Bell to serve it, Bell will secretly throw away your customers’ packets.
That was back last year. Now, fast forward to 2009. Dateline, London.
From BBC:
Britain’s biggest broadband supplier has been accused of limiting download speeds on its cheapest package without giving users a clear warning.
BT Broadband cuts the speed users can watch video services like the BBC iPlayer and YouTube at peak times.
A customer who has signed up for an up to 8 megabit per second package can have their speed cut to below 1Mbps.
A BT spokesman said the firm managed bandwidth “in order to optimise the experience for all customers”.
In Canada this type of behaviour prompted a significant backlash. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar result in the UK.