Slashdot Mirror
Level 3 Shaken Down By Comcast Over Video Streaming
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the gloves are really coming off; Level 3 Communications had to pony up an undisclosed amount of cash to keep Netflix streaming to Comcast customers. Perhaps now the FCC might actually do something to ensure that the internet remains open. Level 3's Chief Legal Officer, Thomas Stortz, said: 'Level 3 believes Comcast's current position violates the spirit and letter of the FCC's proposed Internet Policy principles and other regulations and statutes, as well as Comcast's previous public statements about favoring an open Internet. While the network neutrality debate in Washington has focused on what actions a broadband access provider might take to filter, prioritize or manage content requested by its subscribers, Comcast's decision goes well beyond this. With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast's subscribers at all, unless Comcast's unilaterally-determined toll is paid — even though Comcast's subscribers requested the content. With this action, Comcast demonstrates the risk of a 'closed' Internet, where a retail broadband Internet access provider decides whether and how their subscribers interact with content.'"
You should have done what FOX and NBC have done in the past - Cut off Comcast. When that happens the customers invariably blame the cable company for being greedy, not the broadcasters or Level 3 or netflix
Then Comcast would be forced to stop banning netflix, else risk losing customers.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Only two levels to go!
We're doomed!
You are no longer my ISP.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Keep the government out of my internet! The corporations can solve their problems in a way that the consumer is not effected!
Right?
Guys?
anyone?
I generally respect Karl Denninger's viewpoint on these issues since he was one of the people actually involved in building out the internet.
Yes they use a lot of bandwidth, that Comcast's customers pay for in overpriced monthly fees.
So glad I don't have to deal with Comcast anymore
Considering that Comcast posted a net income of over 3.5 billion last year I think asking them to reinforce their infrastructure so they can be competitive is not outside the realm of being reasonable.
Then Comcast would be forced to stop banning netflix, else risk losing customers.
Uh, that's not how I see it going down. That would be like a staring contest and I'd bet that Netflix would blink first.
Customer: Hello, Netflix, I can't stream your movies anymore.
Netflix: Uh, well, that's your ISP's fault for not coordinating with our CDN.
Customer: But the rest of the internet is working fine.
Netflix: Yes, well, you need to get a different internet provider.
Customer: Comcast is the only broadband provider in my area.
Netflix: Well, write them an angry letter because it's not our fault.
So do you think the user is going to quit using Comcast or do you think they'll have no choice but to stop subscribing to Netflix since they can no longer stream movies? I think the latter is more likely what would happen. It's different because Fox and NBC provide a lot of free content and can easily tell the customer that their ISP is blocking the news. With Comcast, they know that Netflix is pulling down tons of money (look at their stock value) and they know that if they hold out they can wring more money out of L3 and, eventually, Netflix. And since in most of Comcast's realm there's a complete lack of a competitor. That's the real issue here, that Comcast customers often have no choice and there's a barrier of a cost to entry for anyone else to enter in as competition with them. Fix that and you solve this whole problem because then your scenario might work if users are really upset enough to change ISPs when Netflix doesn't work because their current ISP is trying to negotiate for more cash.
My work here is dung.
Comcast says the issue with Level 3 is a peering dispute and says it "offered Level 3 the same terms it offers to Level 3s CDN competitors for the same traffic." The issue seems to be that the Level 3's addition of Netflix as a customer may have altered the balance of the traffic exchange between Level 3 and Comcast. In other words, Comcast says the volume of traffic is the issue, while Level 3 says the type of traffic is the issue.
Finally, a real example people can point to and say, "SEE!" when talking about net neutrality.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
If Comcast are a monopoly supplier (ie customers cannot get broadband from another ISP) then maybe the customers who cannot get Netflix (or whatever else) should bring a class action suit against Comcast.
Nobody save a moron would make the ridiculous claim that customers will not be affected by either government involvement or lack thereof. The issue is, in which way will the customer be most positively, or least negatively effected. Unfortunately this was handled poorly by Level 3, who should have said "no problem, cut us off, we'll get our lawyers to start the class action suit on behalf of your customers right away." They should have then sent out snail mail to all their customers who have comcast (determinable by IP) informing them of Comcast's actions, and their right to enter the lawsuit. That being said, I am all for a law that makes it illegal for anyone, government included, to fuck with the internet.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
is Netflix should start billing Comcast for agreesing to deliver content to Comcast customers. I wonder how Comcast would like THAT.
Do any of these hold water?
Illegal interference of a business relationship (between for example Amazon and a Comcast customer)?
Simple fraud and wire fraud, by telling customers that they're getting access to the Internet, when in fact Comcast knows its delivering only a subset of the Internet?
Copyright violation, because by filtering out some content, it loses Common Carrier status under the DMCA, and is thus liable for any coyright violations passing through its network?
Antitrust, because they're abusing their local near-monopoly on broadband internet into other areas of commerce.
You guys have it better than we do at the moment. Ed Vaizley (Communications Minister) has supported the idea of paying extra for access to certain content on the internet. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11773574 As you can imagine I'm not too pleased about this, you guys are still looking to your government to help you, ours has already said they'll do the opposite.
Already waiting for FIOS here, but if Comcast had cut off Netflix that would have driven me to DSL in the interim. Admittedly, streaming video takes more of Comcast's bandwidth than static pages, but there is streaming video from Apple trailers, youtube, porn, news sites and plenty more. Either Comcast builds and bills a service that supports that, or not. If not, they will lose out business to companies that can.
My at&t DSL may only be 1.2 mbps but its a reliable 1.2 and Netflix streaming works reliably. What good
is comcast's "high speed" cable internet if its a high speed road to nowhere?
the equipment necessary to stream the kind of bandwidth Netflix needs to a significant portion of their customers simply can not be purchased and maintained for the current price of a residential broadband connection.
Do we know that for a fact? I am skeptical. Bandwidth usage globally is increasing, and the rate of increase is increasing, and it's only going to get worse. Every ISP in the world has to deal with this every day, every year, and so on. Comcast is a huge company. If carrying Netflix is putting them in the red, why doesn't it do the same to small, local cable ISPs, who only have a few thousand customers? Why aren't the local ISPs' upstream providers doing the same thing? What about ISPs in Europe and Japan, where they provide comparatively enormous amounts of bandwidth to users? Why aren't they going bankrupt when they're sending 10x the bandwidth Comcast provides to each customer?
I may be wrong, but I suspect it's not a matter of losing money carrying Netflix content, but simply a matter of corporate greed.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Notice that the dispute is not between Comcast and Netflix -- it's between Comcast and Level3, which doesn't create content, only owns pipes. Level3 and Comcast have a "peer" agreement; they generate a similar amount of traffic, so they accept each others' traffic for free. That's a typical arrangement. However, this was before Netflix changed CDN from Akamai to Level3. Akamai sends much more traffic to Comcast than it receives, so it pays Comcast for receiving the traffic. That's also a typical arrangement. Now that Neflix will be going over Level3 instead, Comcast is just trying to negotiate the same deal w/ Level3 as with Comcast:
Net neutrality may be an important issue, but it's not the issue here.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Is your current subscription in your name or your roomate's name? Just cancel the subscription and then re-subscribe using the other person's personal information. No way they are filtering/throttling based on a street address.
As soon as authority gets involved in commerce, the market ceases to be free, and falls prey to regulation and rent-seeking.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I find this whole argument ridiculous. Isn't the simple, effective solution to simply charge customers based on the amount of data they consume?
I mean, if I want to use Netflix, shouldn't I pay for the bandwidth required to use the service? Why should that cost be shared by my neighbor, who only uses the internet to check his email and the news?
Charge consumers per byte of data they send/receive. Yes, it sucks if you are a bandwidth hog, but its really the only fair solution.
I mean, there's a reason other utilities, such as electricity, water, or waste disposal don't give unlimited plans. It's just not a reasonable way of doing things. You should pay for what you are in fact consuming, rather than subsidizing the consumption of your neighbor who has a hundred torrents going all night, every night.
I agree, it sucks but it's really the only fair solution. It might stifle growth of some services which consume lots of data, but it would also have major benefits, for examples companies would be motivated to reduce the amount of bandwidth their services provide.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
In my area, I have access through Time Warner, AT&T and a local provider who uses AT&T to run the fiber right to your home, though you have to pay an exorbitant fee to have this put in. Right now, I am using Time Warner's service, mostly because I have had bad dealings with AT&T in the past (while I used them for wireless, they completely jacked up my bill every single month, and finally, after I had cancelled the contract and paid the termination fee, they started to get all concerned about "customer satisfaction" and "retention"...too little too late)
I will tell you the truth; I hate both Time Warner and AT&T with a passion. Just last month I started having DNS resolution issues. Websites that I had previously been able to access would suddenly pop up with a 404 page (conveniently hosted by...Time Warner!). I called the local office and they said they knew nothing, even checked to see if there were any outages, and nothing came up on their screen. Finally got through to one of their internet support and he informed me that they switched over to new DNS relay servers in our area. One switch over to my router, and I plugged in Google's public DNS servers where I had previously allowed the Time Warner DNS to relay...and all the sudden, my pages started to resolve just fine. In fact, the resolution was even faster than it had ever been before.
My wife noticed the difference immediately. She's an avid WoW player, and she said her latency went down considerably...how could DNS affect latency, I thought, unless the DNS was routing all the traffic through some sort of filter? Did I just stumble on some sort of nefarious scheme on the part of TW? I experienced the same issues with Netflix movies over the TW network as well. While under TW DNS, my netflix movies would have to recache at least once every 30-40 minutes. Now, under the Google DNS, it never has to cache. I wonder...
Full disclosure: I worked in a Comcast department that helped to determine what future internet bandwidth requirement were going to be. They fired me for reasons I don't feel like getting into, I'll try to give an unbiased account of what I think their thinking is.
Honestly, Comcast is extremely frugal. This can be both good and bad. In 2008, Wall Street types were encouraging them to take on a lot more debt before the debt bubble popped.
They do a lot of things in order to free up bandwidth and to satisfy bandwidth demand. It's not like they are sitting on their butts and collecting money. But what they are not going to do is put fiber optics straight to your home, which would be the clearest way to expand the amount of bandwidth. That is extremely expensive and only Verizon is doing that. No other telco is doing that.
When they are converting analog channels to digital, they are doing that to free up bandwidth. They are trying to roll out Switch Digital Video in order to free up bandwidth (80 or so channels which barely anyone watches in a given service group will be swapped in and out when needed). They split off customers into different service groups to mitigate this as well. They are constantly monitoring this and a lot of hard work goes into this.
What I think is going on is not that they are worried about cable revenues going down (and I think they know that it is inevitable) but they are freaking out about an increase in web video eating up all their bandwidth. I can't be certain about this. But you have to also understand a corporation has several different parts. One part might not care about something while another part may view Netflix as an existential threat.
So while I would love to bash Comcast because I feel they screwed me over, I can't sit here and tell you that they aren't doing anything.
However, Verizon does have a superior product in my opinion which works better for reasons I could get into. But that basically comes down to the fact they don't have much legacy equipment on their system and they went with fiber-to-the-home instead of fiber-to-the-neighborhood.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The Internet is assymetrical. I click a few times, and in comes gigs of movie. Even when I wax on about something important here, or send a Christmas email of a few kilobytes, I read many more. One post on facebook yields me megabytes of web page.
This is an old complaint. Multiple providers used to complain about peering arrangements in the late 90s, and then they got together and dealt with it. Sprint and Cogent get into hissy fits regularly, mostly because Cogent undercuts Sprint access pricing, and Sprint tries to hurt Cogen by raising their peering fees. It all goes away.
Now the cable companies are whining that other content providers are taking advantage of their networks by pouring data into their gateways without compensating these poor media delivery networks for the effort.
This would be a lot easier to deal with if the cable co ISPs, in particular, had a content delivery business that they could sell to non-subscribers, but they don't. So they want to encourage their subscribers to 'stay at home' and use the content they DO have, which is pretty much on-demand TV and pay-per-view movies. So far, subscribers aren't as interested as expected, and seem to prefer Netflix. Pricing has a lot to do with this, but massive numbers of new releases are the big driver.
So do the cable cos have a beef here? Should they be compensated by other Internet media providers for the highly assymetrical traffic they are receiving?
No. They already are being compensated by subscribers.
I pay Cox about $50/mo for Internet service, and I rarely watch or stream anything. My limited gaming is no great burden, the issue there being latency. My occasional downloads of ISOs for a Linux distro are so rare they can't be causing Cox any real trouble. I don't Hulu, don't Netflix, don't even YouTube. But I may have to. My video bill with Cox is closing in on $100/mo, and it's not worth it. In high season, I pay about $3 per show that I WANT to watch on TV. That's about 30 shows, assuming it is October and all my favs are on. Now that several have ended for the season, it actually costs me almost $5 per show tha I WANT to watch. The rest is idle channel-surfing, entirely optional viewing, and I could not do any of it and not feel cheated. Seems like a lot. If I could stream current episodes of some programming, I could kill my cable. Actually, I could kill my cable since only one show can't be had over the air, and I can deal with that. I can use ATSC and be done with cable. I live so close to the DSL box I can get slammin' speed and Qwest seems ready to call me back. I even have a wireless DS option that's good for 5MB down, and the hardware isn't too expensive. I may yet have to exercise my freedom and go elsewhere. I can buy a ChannelMaster DVR at Fry's for $300 if I'm too lazy to whip up a media server/PDVR out of stuff I'm not using any more.
But this is really about the ISP, this case being a cable co, trying to get paid twice. I pay for access to content. They want the providers to pay separately. Imagine the Post Office making you buy a stamp to send an envelope, and then having to buy another stamp to pick up your incoming mail. Nice.
Of course, in the end, we pay.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I work for a small cable isp. We care. We really do. We just don't have the resources to continue to support company's that compete against us. That isn't the only factor though. The other is bandwidth. Not the little sippy straw bandwidth that most people have. Netflix is crushing our usage. If we have to pay for programming Netflix is going to have to pay for pushing their programming to us. I would like to block them here. Other company's such as espn (espn360.com) block our customers from streaming their video unless we pay by the subscriber. I haven't heard of any backlash for them doing this. But block netflix then suddenly we are the evil cable company. If we had the pull comcast had we would have done that around here a long time ago.
Comcast wants to paint this as a peering dispute: you send me way more bytes than I send you, ergo you pay.
Comcast is an eyeball network, with extreme Down:Up ratios--what do they expect? It's the nature of the business they're in. Their customers pull far far more than they push. And many customers want bytes from Netflix, which they pay Comcast to deliver to them. Double-dipping, pure and simple. This peering rule of thumb no longer makes much sense, with the world divided into content networks and eyeball networks.
What I think this is really about is Comcast
A) wanting to preserve its extremely high profit margins on its broadband business. For years, the average subscriber has paid his $45/month for broadband, and used it lightly. Now that there's a high-bandwidth killer-app in the form of streaming Netflix, people are using broadband, like broadband, and it's a threat to broadband providers and their massive infrastructure oversubscription ratios.
B) Wanting to favor its own streaming content. Traditional CATV is in trouble, and netflix has a big jump on competitors both in terms of public perception, and technical polish. Comcast wants in that game, and what better way to get a leg up than to leverage your last mile advantages.
Rubbish. It's time for the govt. to step in and take ownership, or heavily regulate, the last mile pipe. Then, allow competitive service offerings through that pipe.
But I'm a one-percenter in more ways than one.
You're in a motorcycle gang?
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Please note that our system totally favors a TWO party system. Requirements to get on ballots are written so that only two majors can really field a candidate. Smaller parties are usually co opted to one "line" or the "other". Even Ross Perot found this to be a huge stumbling block. At the end, the Republicrats magnanimously "agreed to waive any challenges" to the Perot candidacy. Both parties realized that this could have morphed into a "why is a third party so hard to do" (and probably figured he'd hurt the other side) conversation so they turned the discussion onto Perot and away from the system. No water for Perot, but he is a great example of a person with the ability and wealth to pose a serious effort. He was "rejected" from the body politic like a bacteria. Meanwhile, your third party candidate won't easily get on any ballot here in NY, and I'm sure that applies not only in the EasternUrbanIntellectualNorthEastVeryBlueState but also in DownHomeMiddleOfTheNationPatrioticVeryRedState too. The lack of a real choice is nationwide. The Tea Party, by nominally siding with the Repub side, missed this huge set of rocks in the river. They may come under that umbrella but if the co opt efforts from the owners of the current R Party don't work, they might be tossed out into the wilderness of election law.
Alternatively, due to Comcast's monopoly abuse, NetFlix and Akamai were absorbing costs that, in a fair market, would be absorbed by Comcast and the consumer.
This is an interesting isomorphic thought exercise, but it contributes very little to the discussion.
And if history has show us anything about Toll Roads it's that they cause problems. While it seems cities can build Toll Roads, that ultimately pay for large civil engineering projects (arguably.) This whole situation with Comcast brings to mind the old west settler who owns a section of a river. Want to move through his section of the river, gotta pay a Toll. But in this case, Comcast created the river, which might change things. Taking into account the Anti Trust issues, and the River Toll analogy, I fail to see how the government can allow this to continue. Is it a matter of time before the "Comcast is the only high speed provider in my area" statement goes away and other smaller, ISP's are able to setup shop in most cities? Or will the government actually pass a law about this?
uses a tremendous amount of bandwidth. I know we should be arguing that they need new infrastructure, but just try to convince comcast to spend 2 billion dollars so you can watch fresh prince of bel-air. Not gonna happen.
*I* pay for that service. That is the point of the customer paying for the internet, to get data streamed from other places to my box. If suddenly Comcast wants someone else to pay for my data stream that is fine, but they need to stop charging me too. Trying to charge two parties for the same data stream, that is unethical.
Further more, EVERY data stream from netflix to a comcast customer is paid for by the comcast customer already. Comcast wants it to be paid for twice.
This *isn't* a peering dispute. Comcast is sending Level 3 data to route off somewhere. Level 3 is sending Comcast bits because Comcast subscribers are asking for them. Comcast is routing Level 3's traffic around anywhere but directly to their subscribers, and Level 3 certainly wouldn't need them to in the first place.
So to recap: all data coming from Level 3 to Comcast is requested by Comcast, and paid for by the subscribers. This is simply Comcast's typical greed and hand-waving.
This isn't a peering dispute; Comcast is only try to paint it as one -- and you bought it.
If a Comcast customer set up a proxy server at some cheap:bandwidth hosting company, they could get Netflix data sent to the proxy, encrypted there, then sent down to their home (and the reverse for requests). A simple passphrase and XOR could make the encryption extremely low overhead, and easily set up over ssh or SSL. These hosts can cost as little as $10 a month but be reliable, which added to Netflix's charges is still cheaper than paying for Comcast TV.
And indeed all traffic could be routed through that simple VPN, protecting everything from Comcast's prying, now that Comcast has proven (again) that it cannot be trusted. Email, web, IM, everything.
That's the principle. What's the current best software to set up the proxy at the host and at the LAN?
--
make install -not war