Digital agency heads on Net Neutrality

"Traffic shaping is an essential part of managing the internet when capacity is insufficient for the current demands placed upon it. For example, in central Edinburgh the fastest consumer broadband available for my home runs at around 2MB per second. So different types of content need to be prioritised and not just treated equally.

"However, the decisions made in traffic shaping by ISPs could clearly be influenced by financial factors. Should an ISP have the freedom to decide on your behalf if a YouTube video of Rory Paterson from MediaCom singing is less or more important than an ITV stream of the X Factor or a BBC interview with John Swinney about the budget?

"I would argue that ISPs shouldn't be given the freedom to manage the availability of content and therefore shape not just traffic but speech."

Garry Bryne, Head of Strategy, Reading Room Manchester

"The concept of mid-stream billing for preferential treatment on the internet, as proposed by Ed Vaizey, is to my mind a fundamentally flawed and ill-thought-out suggestion. Forget the potential implications over access to content and if it’s a given right or not; there’s simply no way this could ever be billed fairly.

"For starters, everybody, everywhere, already pays for the data they use – content providers are merely very large consumers – somewhere, there is an ISP charging them for the bandwidth they use. To charge them for preferential treatment is to charge them twice for the same thing, and that’s simply a recipe for years of lawyers getting rich.

"But the main problem, and the one that makes this completely flawed, is where the charging would occur – your connection to Google isn’t just via BT, or VirginMedia (or whoever else you source your broadband from) – it’s routed through a plethora of service providers, and crucially – it’s potentially routed a different way every time. Who gets to charge Google for the video I just watched?

"Yes, Ed – we need to invest in our creaking infrastructure, and we realise that central Government doesn’t want to fund this investment, but please try to put forward ideas that are actually workable, next time."

Andy Burgin, Head of Systems, MadeByPi

"The recent discussions on the creation of the 'two tier Internet' versus net neutrality first emerged earlier this year from similar proposals in the US. However, the recent announcement from Vaizey that the Government plan to support it as a "crucial stage in the history of the internet" has brought it back onto everyone's radar and raised and highlighted the concern that the very foundations of the Internet are under threat.

"We can see that from a business perspective, this poses a great threat in that the two-tier Internet will result in end of the Internet as an open and level playing field. The proposal to allow ISP's to create 'fast lanes' and 'slow lanes' means that smaller companies will find it increasingly difficult to compete with the industry leaders with their huge, quick loading websites. This is why companies such as Google argue that the move will stifle online innovation and freedom of expression.

"As digital professionals, we can support BBC's Eric Huggers argument that "an open and neutral Internet is crucial to the growth of our digital economy" and that by enabling ISPs to effectively differentiate between types of service ultimately threatens and shakes the egalitarian nature of the Internet.

"On a real-world level, however, it's unlikely that the average consumer will notice any difference. ISPs already commoditise their product charging - consumers currently pay for different packages, receive varying levels of service and fair usage policies are actually the norm. It could even be argued that if the companies are restricting their service for certain users with the greater population in mind then this is in the best interests of the country as a whole. And given the healthy competition in the ISP market, consumers are actually in control of this.

"And if it does however generate more cash for the ISPs and if that's then invested back into the network infrastructure to make it bigger, better, faster etc. then that's potentially good for us as digital agencies as we have the opportunity to innovate further developing more immersive and engaging applications and solutions.

"On the flip side though, this needs to be closely monitored as we can't start introducing a divide in the internet, otherwise everything that it stands for is being endangered, and as soon as these companies start taking advantage of this government stance for their own purposes then the whole meaning of it is worthless."

Greg Moss, Delivery Manager, Realise

"As a Culture Minister during a time of vicious public spending you'd think Ed Vaizey would have quite enough on his plate without squaring up to luminaries like Tim Berners-Lee in the on-going, global debate about net neutrality. But in a speech to business leaders this week Mr Vaizey weighed into the debate on the side of service providers. In it he stated that service providers should be able to explore other business models which include charging content publishers for preferential treatment in their traffic management techniques.

"The speech is pragmatic in tone, and it seeks to strike a balance between retaining the open principles of the internet and addressing the need of those that build and maintain the networks that underpin it. There is no doubt that service providers face huge challenges, with the popularity of services such as video, music and mobile eating up existing bandwidth at an exponential rate.

"What the speech doesn't address directly is how we can ensure that innovation on the internet can continue to drive successful start-ups. Back in the late nineties there were a number of search engines available which tended to return roughly the same results for a search term. Then Google came along and everything changed. Their service was different and their results much more accurate. This was the key differentiator that enabled them to gain initial market share and create a base from which they could build the successful enterprise we see today. Now imagine a landscape where one of these established search services had enough capital, and the will, to ensure that its results were delivered to the user much faster than its upstart rival. Would it have changed the Google story? Perhaps not, but it would undoubtedly have had an impact as the consumer would have effectively been asked to choose between accuracy and speed.

"This is a fundamental point to bear in mind - one of the reasons the internet, and the services that are built upon it, have enjoyed such success is that consumers can choose which services they wish to subscribe to without artificial constraints forming part of the equation. Tinkering with this evolutionary landscape by imposing obstacles puts at risk the innovation that relies upon it.

"Even without behemoths like Google, Facebook and Amazon, the UK digital economy is worth some 8% of GDP. At a time when the government is desperate to encourage small and medium size enterprises, they should be very cautious in supporting measures which could potentially stifle innovation and growth."