The chairman of one digital agency has a good rant about the current scramble for business by the ISPs, offering some keen advice on how they could improve their services and win more customers.

I recently moved house and as is my want, I decided to re-evaluate my home broadband. Having been signed up on Sky's triple play (getting a lofty 5mb service), I figured it was time for a change. It should have been a fairly straightforward switch. After all, ISPs were historically a commodity of speed and reliability against price, but now the world has moved on and there is a bit of a minefield to navigate if you are a heavy net user.

It's been widely covered in the press but the imminent arrival of behavioural targeting via systems, like Phorm, is cause for concern. Whilst obviously as a marketer the notion of higher clickthrough rates due to relevant creative is appealing, the overall 'price' is simply to high for me to personally bear.

I remember when TiVo first launched in the U.S. with a wonderful 'feature' that could predict what kind of shows you were interested in based on your viewing habits. It made the news when some poor dude watched 'Sex and the City' and was subsequently bombarded with gay porn. The 'feature' was promptly removed.

In any given household you've got to assume a number of users. In my case it is me and the wife plus whoever happens to be piggybacking off our network at any given time. Funnily enough, our surfing habits are somewhat divergent. I'm sure they've come up with all kinds of nice cookie identifiers for profiles which could work, but not if the computer in question is shared. Of course, you could instruct the 'family' user to create separate accounts on the machine and to log in and out but really, all this to get the right ads?

Forget that. At least they could offer us a cut of the additional ad revenue they're going to get!

Then you've got the current move to get ISPs to police their customers for file-sharing activity as they're now doing in Japan. It's well worth having a gander at how the various ISPs have responded. Virgin media's boss, being one of the most nonplussed about it all, actually remarked that it's a 'load of bollocks' and that they'll put their punters in 'bus lanes' if they don't pay enough.

Now this is just bloody ridiculous. Even if the ISPs could differentiate between 'legal' and 'illegal' usage, do they really want to criminalise all their own precious consumers? Never mind what this could mean for customer services, most of which are woefully under resourced. I'm trying to be diplomatic. Most customer service departments are just plain rubbish and the additional workload -- even if the alerts are automated -- from the number of irate users phoning up to complain to them for sending warnings is going to inevitably be massive.

Of course, you've then got the whole Comcast versus Torrent affair: why worry about file sharing when we can throttle and turn off the relevant ports? Again, apart from the obvious 'censoring user services on the internet' (which is a horrible and worrying precedent to set), it is entirely unenforceable in the long term anyway, since the file-sharing 'community' will just find a system which uses port 80 like, for example, rapidshare -- just to annoy them!

Thankfully, Comcast came to their senses but you can bet your house that there are a bunch of ISPs left thinking what a great idea it was.

I really love Warner's plan to levy a music tax / licence fee of $5 per month on all participating ISPs consumers in the U.S. Does that mean they are suggesting that all music that everyone consumes is illegal and therefore we should all be forced to pay since we can't be persuaded to do it the legal way? What happens to this $5 anyway? Do the artists get it? How do they slice up the royalties? Are they going to do another RIAA and simply pocket the cash and leave the artists hanging? Ridiculous.

Speaking of user licence fees, we're now faced with the debacle surrounding the BBC iPlayer. I actually feel rather sorry for the Beeb as they've spent all this time and money building something which amazingly doesn’t suck (unlike most peer products), but are then being hammered by the ISPs for being successful, providing a service that folks actually want to use (again unlike most of their peers) and hence using too much bandwidth. Did they think that the whole legal IPTV 'thing' was just going to blow over? That we weren't going to be watching an increasing amount of legitimate video content through our computer-cum-telly box?

There are a whole host of other examples (both big and small) of the once-great notion of free information exchange that was the internet becoming commercialised, censored and crippled… and the ISPs are at the heart of much of this.

So much for net neutrality -- it's all going dark.

Having been absorbing all this over the last few months you can actually see why selecting an ISP isn't quite as straightforward as it used to be, though ironically it was indeed ‘Be’ who I ended signing up with!

Jon Bains is chairman, Lateral.