Introducing subscriber-bothering (or how to dis-enhance the customer experience)

But that appears to the objective of UK cable operator, Virgin Media, with its latest wheeze to identify and then 'bother' its users with network slowdowns and service suspensions should any of them be deemed to have been  involved in 'unauthorised distribution' of copyright material.

Virgin last week said it was going to act on information provided by a record company (Universal Music) which will forward it information.  After a few warnings coupled with 'education' on copyright, along with suggestions that it use Virgin's own unlimited music download service (oh, surprise!), it will then start mucking about with errant users by slowing the service and eventually suspending the user from the Internet for brief periods.

The approach is reminiscent of a gruesome 1950s psychology experiment into conditioning, with the 'subscriber-bothering' as phase one, escalating to electric shocks in later phases to shift stubborn file-sharing behaviour for once and all.

Virgin is at some pains to point out that none of the network monitoring takes place on its own network -  it just takes its instructions from Universal.  Likewise the slow-downs and suspensions are presumably designed to fall short of complete 'disconnection' - an option which looks likely to be ruled out under European law unless a court is involved in each decision.

Whether this 'dis-enhancing the customer experience' (as I'm sure it's already been described in some Kafkaesque meeting somewhere in Virgin Towers) will prove to be legal is one issue. But the idea is certainly a customer relations nightmare since slow-downs and outages are probably more annoying for a user than complete expulsion. Certainly, not knowing whether erratic network behaviour is a premeditated attack or just 'service as usual' should up the rate of calls to the technical help desk.