The BBC report, :Towards a two-tier internet," discusses an ongoing feud between content providers and Internet carriers, including Internet Service Providers (ISP's).
It should be noted at the new Voice over IP (VoIP) services offered by Skype (a free service), Vonage, etc., depend upon not being charged for traffic over Internet lines. While this is true of all Internet services (end-users pay a monthly connect fee independent of such services), it becomes an issue for high-traffic services like VoIP, BitTorrent, music file sharing, etc. At some point, ISPs get defensive because a few users can chew up a major portion of their traffic capacity without paying a premium to do so.
That's true enough. Nevertheless, we're clearly in a transitional phase. Network hubs tend to get overwhelmed when traffic from all the pipes out to end-users start to get saturated. Yet, if an end-user's 1.5 megabit/sec. (or 3 megabit/sec.) service is not going to be guaranteed by the service provider, who is at fault? On what basis does the service provider complain that the customers are maxing out their traffic?
All of this tends to mask deeper issues of technology competition and content protection. When an ISP is also in the business of selling land lines, of course they're going to look for excuses to exclude competition from VoIP. If Sony got involved in the ISP business, they would be putting in technological blocks to music and video file sharing.
All of these problems are an excellent reason to exclude content companies from the carrier business and to ensure that companies that have a financial interest in blocking certain kinds of access are legally barred from doing so.
These issues are completely disjoint from the problem of regulating access to pornography.