I hate to say this folks, but this HAS been going on for years and still is.
You could even take it a step further, in that mainstream censorship and monitoring is going on in the background, with BT recently caught in spying on its customers.
AOL has forever done this, albeight through businesses paying them to be AOL accredited to allow sites to load quickly in their crappy browser.. AOL did think it would have the world at one point so this is quite dangerous.
What Virgin are saying, and these people are getting alarmist for is that they will connect their BUSINESS USERS hosting services directly into the VIRGIN backbone , therefore making the sites almost instant for virgin users (on the internal fibre network)
Hmm Its hard to write this without being a bit confusing, what I mean is the internet looks like this to virgin customers:
INTERNET
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VIRGIN PERIMETER NETWORK
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WEB CACHE
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YOUR MODEM.
so when you request a site, if its in Web Cache you get it super fast, if its your side of the virgin perimeter network then you get it really fast as no request is leaving your local network to the internet - (this is why newsservers are so fast, as they are within the Virgin network).
At the moment if I want to host a site with virgin, then virgin will get a RIPE registered external IP address and advertise it on the web. All customers no matter where they are go out through their respective perimeter networks and request it via the web.
What Virgin are proposing (and forgive me, I agree) , is that their customers should get 2 advertised addresses, 1 RIPE one and 1 pseudo address which resolves to an INTERNAL virgin IP range. Therefore, if you want a site hosted by virgin, you wont have to go out to the web to get it. This actually preserves valuable internet bandwith and keeps it all inside.
Neutrality my arse.. you can still view whatever sites you want - the site thats not virgin run will open in the USUAL AMOUNT OF TIME FOR AN EXTERNAL WEBSITE, its just that virgin ones will open FASTER because they are not routing you out to the web and back in again.
I'd also add that its very unlikely this will have a big takeup, unfortunately, as I can't see many established sites such as the BBC switch from in house hosting to an external company, nor any banks for that matter, or most major businesses.
Scaremongering at its very best.