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Telecom TV’s Martyn Warwick reports on a disturbing proposal from the UK, to create a two-tiered system for content that could profoundly change Internet news if implemented. Warwick writes 18 November that “Communications Minister Ed Vaizey in a speech yesterday signaled the Government’s intention to allow service providers to make even more money by allowing them to discriminate between traffic streams and charging extra for ‘prioritizing’ some of them.”

In brief, the big guys would get their information up faster than the little guys, potentially reversing one of the most significant changes the web has created in the world of news media. Warwick is wrong on one point, however, but I suspect it’s an oversight, when he refers to this as “the end of traffic impartiality”. Even today, Google’s news alerts give more weight to the big media players, posting their stories faster than smaller media’s stories, even if the latter are posted first.

That imbalance means that local media, such as GenevaLunch, are not seen to be breaking stories even when they are. Their more knowledgeable local reporting, as opposed to distance reporting from the likes of the New York Times or the BBC, does not receive as much recognition because the stories are  perceived as having been published later. There is a widespread perception that they may therefore have been copied from larger media.

This is really a question of credible and reliable news sources.

But Warwick is right when he says the UK proposal is “dangerous” and that “those who believe that a network that prioritizes traffic presages the end of digital democracy.”

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