Virgin Media’s new CEO, Neil Berkett, has given a controversial interview to the Royal Television Society’s magazine in which he exclaims that "this net neutrality thing is a load of b****cks". He also confirmed that the operator was in the process of doing deals with specific content providers that would see customers able to access them at a faster rate.

Berkett then proceeded to threaten the BBC's iPlayer (IPTV) service and others like it from public broadcasters with traffic restrictions unless they helped contribute towards its costs. His comments mimic a similar outburst from Tiscali last week (here).

There is a distinct difference between imposing general traffic shaping/management upon your network and accepting cash from individual organisations in return for performance favours. We presume, given their stance on iPlayer, that this would thus result in other IPTV/Music services being restricted unless payments were made.

Virgin certainly isn’t going to win themselves any favours here, having already suffered a backlash over their vague stance on the Phorm system. We don’t like where all this is going.