Remember How The Net Neutrality Fight Began - UK ISP, BBC debate highlights where dispute originated...

Around the world, the planet's largest ISPs have been whining. They've been whining about how the dropping cost of bandwidth & hardware, their significant profit margins, and abundant new revenue streams (advertising via webmail, BVAS, selling your clickstream data, DNS Redirection revenue, charging to get around spam filters, targeted behavioral advertising) make it hard for a poor, cash-strapped telecom conglomerate to build out enough capacity to handle user demand.

In the UK, ISPs have been complaining for a year that the BBC's new media player actually uses bandwidth, so they've tried to argue the BBC should subsidize their network expansion.

This kind of logic was what started the entire "network neutrality" debate in the U.S. In 2005, then-AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre told Business Week that because people use Google, Google should help pay for AT&T's network deployment (or as Ed put it, Google ain't usin' his pipes for free). In short, ISP executives want to please investors by offloading necessary video-driven upgrade expenses on to others.

In the UK, ISPs have been demanding the BBC either subsidizes their network builds via a "congestion charge," or ISPs will start throttling iPlayer traffic. The BBC this week responded by saying content operators should name and shame any ISP that uses traffic shaping to restrict content. Says the BBC's director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield:

I would not suggest that ISPs start to try and charge content providers. They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want....Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content worked best on (and which to avoid).

Of course that only works if there's competition. In truly competitive markets, any provider who makes their bandwidth less useful would see customer defections to alternative ISPs. That's exactly why users in Canada this week are so angry with Bell Canada's efforts to crush those alternative ISPs who offer un-throttled connectivity. There would be no network neutrality debate if there was real competition in these markets. Users wouldn't allow it.

No matter how hard global incumbent lobbyists and public relations officials may distort it (and do they ever), their goal remains clear: ISP executives in uncompetitive markets, flush with envy over content operator ad income, want to get their hands on this revenue to please investors -- despite already being paid for bandwidth.

It really is that simple. Whether there should be legislation to protect consumers from this digital gold lust is a different argument, but the primary logic that started this debate should not be forgotten or distorted.