Peter N

If BT et al use any income from Phorm to drop their montly fees then the other ISPs will either sign-up or go bust.

BT could even drop their prices for a few months as a special offer to lure more people into 18 month contracts just to get the maximum number of punters using Phorm. I call this the Tesco effect because that company is notorious for dropping prices on any item or range that is sold locally by any other shop - you open a small record shop and they put you out of business by selling chart CDs at below cost. They make the money back in the long term by creating a monopoly.

All of the normal rules of supply and demand go out of the window when you deal with a company as big as BT and they are not going to worry too much about fighting a couple of small ISPs for business when they know that they have such vast resources behind them.

Webwise will be advertised in such a way that the average person has no idea of the privacy inmplications and they'll be lead to believe that all internet use is risky and that this is no big deal. That's the track that Phorm have gone down and BT are Phorm's faithful dog.

You pay less than £1 a day for internet usage and after you take the overheads from that I doubt if the ISPs make more than a few pounds per year per houshold. Compared with the overhead free income offered by Phorm then losing even a few million customers to the smaller ISPs - most of whom pay BT for the lines and bandwidth anyway - is not going to worry them too much. It would be a different matter if those people were to migrate to Virgin or Carphone Warehouse but that's not going to happen and BT will remain way up at the top of the ISP tree.

Bear in mind that BT is also the first choice ISP for so many non-technically minded people who still think of BT as being a public organisation and you'll have to go a long way before you can make even a tiny dent in their profits and unless ISP level DPI interception is completely outlawed or tightly controlled then we are going to be spid on by all ISPs because market forces will be such that an "ethical" ISP will not exist to migrate to.