Time Warner Filtering iTunes Traffic?

An anonymous reader writes "Starting on Thursday, January 31st, Time Warner subscribers in Texas starting experiencing connectivity issues to the iTunes store to the point where the service wasn't usable. General internet traffic issues haven't coincided with these problems, and many folks have reported that the store works as normal when they head to the nearest mega-bookstore and use their ISP instead. Time Warner has announced that they're going to begin trials of tiered pricing in one local Texas market, but I'll be darn sure to switch my provider if I hear the slightest hint of destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers."

Comments

Re:For $1500/month

[fitsnips]

can you read?

"destination/content based tiers instead of bandwidth tiers"

bandwith throttling we understand, its the content/destination filtering that is bs. They now are deciding what biz survive and which do not.

I can back these claims

[yamamushi]

I'm in San Antonio TX right now, and Itunes has been so slow since thursday, to the point of being completely unusable. Whereas downloading albums or tv shows would take a few minutes, I'm now looking at an expected wait of 4 hours for a 3mb download. I thought it might have been issues with the itunes servers, but kudos to the article for shedding some light on the issue.

Re:Bad Summary

[solar_blitz]

At the beginning it seemed as that iTunes 7.6 is just as likely to be the culprit as the ISPs, but given that the peoples' speeds returned to normal (I, too, rtfa'd) - without an update patch for iTunes - it would seem like it was an issue on the server side of Apple or Time Warner. Since nobody from other areas in the United States complained about the issue as frequently as those from the Austin, Texas region this is not likely caused by Apple. Odds are it is a Time Warner issue. I never studied servers or networking, so all I can go by is my own experience.

Ironically...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Tiered internet would support oligarchies and monopolies more.

Imagine a world where "the studios" had to pay for all bandwidth usage twice, or suffer degraded performance. What happens to independent projects, then?

Did someone actually try to argue that raising the barrier of entry can do anything at all other than support the existing, entrenched power structures?

Re:Net neutrality doesn't exist even now.

[NeutronCowboy]

My point is, we all get the idea, but how far fetched is the difference from paying extra for the ability to send and receive SMTP traffic, paying extra to send/receive HTTPS traffic, and, of course, the coup de gras, paying extra to access Google or Yahoo! It is coup de grace, but otherwise, spot on. Someone mod this guy. This is the wet dream of all ISPs: to charge you by connection type, by port, by protocol and finally, by content and end-point access. They want to charge you the same way they charge your cell phone usage: lots of completely made up charges that are only differentiated because their tracking software can.

I predict in the fairly near future (5 years or so) that there'll be a lot of these tests going on, and a lot of cut-rate Internet offerings that have these sort of restrictions. If even 20% of all customers sign on, I expect that all future offerings will be of that nature.

Shudder. It will be the end of the Internet as a medium of innovation, communication and productivity enhancements... it'll become like TV and radio.

Re:For $1500/month

[pipatron]

I went so far as to file fraud charges against them.

And what happened?

Re:For $1500/month

[sumdumass]

Not to mention that Time Warner either owns or has partnered with Rapsody, an Itunes competitor.

Re:For $1500/month

[Tony Hoyle]

This has already been through the courts. Someone tried exactly your argument and failed.

The ISPs successfully argued 'unlimited' means unlimited *access* not unlimited service. As long as they're not saying you can long use the internet at certain times they're safe.