Slashdot Mirror
French ISP Throttles Direct Download Website
siliconbits contributes this snippet: "In what might be the first of many, French Internet Service Provider Orange has been caught throttling traffic to one of the world's biggest direct download websites, Megaupload. The site, which also operates Megavideo, states that Orange, which is owned by France Telecom, is preventing its users from accessing its downloading and video streaming service freely and says that it can prove it."
Others have probably been doing it already.
You don't want an invading army of filesharers to roll in and take over your country.
Is that even illegal? I think that's the whole reason for the Net Neutrality debate here in the states, and I don't actually know if it's illegal here yet... although I may be ignorant of some more basic law there that covers this kind of thing. But have our more politically enlightened friends in France made it illegal yet?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Sounds like Orange is French for Comcast.
Please Verizon get Fios in my area soon.
all these download sites throttle the connection themselves (unless you are a premium user)
Not to mention really hard to work captchas, and waiting 30 second or more to download.
So I guess if it's really being throttled no one notices it
how long until
Proudly refusing to give you the bandwidth you paid for since 1998.
It's going to be extra interesting if Rapidshare is not throttled
It's going to be hilarious if Rapidshare paid money to Orange ("voluntarily" or not)
It's going to be a toin coss when the EU Commissioners for Competition and "Digital Agenda" are going to get involved.
Bell Canada does (did?) the same thing. I was downloading something from hotfile late at night and the download was locked at 30KB/s. I just happened to be watching it when 2am rolled by and it instantly shot up to 200KB/s. Bell does the same thing with bittorrent - it locks them at 30KB/s from 5pm to 2am.
Thing was my isp at the time wasn't even Bell, it was Teksavvy. Teksavvy leases out part of the phone line architecture from Bell so they're users get hit by the throttling too.
My son downloads so much stuff that I would hope more ISPs do this. Hopefully this will deter him from slowing things down at home for all the reset of us!
I am working for France Telecom/Orange in a service directly involved with this problem, and I can assure you that this throttling is not true. ... Which lead to just apologizes: yes FT/Orange is not the cutting-edge ISP and Telco it used to be; but No we are not doing it on purpose.
Actually, we had the same problem with Youtube, and at the same time other ISP had the same issue though they resolved it faster than us
Music: I am not old, but when I was a kid, an audiocasette was $12-$14 at the store, and minimum wage was $3.35. You could work half a day (4 hours) to buy one album. Now I am getting mp3 albums from amazon for $5-$7 each, and minimum wage is $7.25 (1 hour). (My own viewpoint is probably skewed further because I actually was earning minimum wage then, and naturally make more now). And usually a few tracks of any album can be found for free on youtube.
Video: Most movies can be streamed legally for $1-$3, and that's if they're not already available through netflix $8/mo unlimited streaming plan. Even paid piracy sites used to cost more than that. Is it even worth two hours of my time to watch if it's not worth $1 to me? I don't feel the slightest incentive to shell out for a Blu-Ray player and their $20 discs.
Granted, piracy is probably to thank for putting price pressure on the content cartels. And net neutrality is just as important for 3rd party legal streaming as illegal downloading, since from the ISPs perspective they're exactly the same. But anyways, this story made me think how things have got quite a bit better in the last few years.
As the article makes it clear, Orange is not actively throttling traffic. It stems from a long peering dispute between Cogent and France Telecom (Orange's parent company). The issue is affecting Orange throughout Europe (not just France).
Proudly refusing to give you the bandwidth you paid for since 1998.
What you paid for then - and what you pay for now - is 24/7 access and flat rate monthly billing at a mass market price. As oppossed to billing-by-the hour for dial-up sevices like Compuserve --- at a stiff $8 to $12 an hour, unadjusted for inflation.
For me it looks more like Orange not wishing to do peering with Cogent and Tata, both used by Megaupload. As bandwidth through the other links costs Orange money, they probably throttle bandwidth with megaupload or something like that.
It is a peering issue, France Telecom is trying to push OpenTransit on the market by making Level3, Cogent look bad.
Orange users can, as I told them many times before, contact the OpenTransit NOC to complain.
Yes. It's called common carrier status, and it's what gives ISP's the ability to not be responsible for what their users do. As soon as they start filtering traffic, they are no longer common carrier, and should be legally responsible for ANY wrongdoing of their users. They're busy trying to have their cake and eat it too though.
I was just discussing this the other day with a friend. Captchas are usually hard to read for most people who are not used to them. Some of them are really messy (I remember Rapidshare's cats).
And the alternative (some people have bad eyesights) is, many times, a long set of horrible sounds and spoken words that I usually fail to get right.
"garble, garble, random noise, FOUR, garble, garble, SEE (or whas it SEA?), garble, garble, RED."
Added to that, not everyone might understand those pronunciations.
Finally, as Parent said, do they really prevent anything?
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
If you want to download a shit load of stuff then what is the problem with paying for it? I pay for a limited daytime usage (60GB/month) which is more than enough for the time being. My ISP has a list of sites that will be capped throughput wise of which Megaupload is one of them and I am fine with that. People really need to get real with the concept that bits and bytes actually do cost something.
I'm genuinely surprised, this is exactly opposite of what I'd expect to happen.
I'd think that the AC would say he has pirated software and would tell him why he was wrong. Not the other way around.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
For the record, I'm cheap.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I work for a "Tier-1" ISP. FT (Opentransit) AS5511 is a legacy telco that has engaged in highly protective market practices. In order to interconnect within Paris (for example) they will ask that you pay them to interconnect. They also are surprised when interconnects grow full as their customers continue to seek the content that is not available on their network. I suspect they think the way about their network the way Sarkozy thinks about Renault. It's french, therefor it's offensive for content to reach france without FT being paid for it. Either the internet is going to move to a more settlement based interconnection vs the existing SFI model, or people like FT will hold their business partners and customers hostage to their own (possibly outdated) cost models.
I'm pretty cheap too, but run Linux, so there's no software to pirate :)
If two anonymous cowards (0) are talking in a woods (or slashdot), does anybody hear them? ;-) by commodore64_love The Douchebag (1445365) on Saturday January 15, @12:06PM (#34890028)
Oh that's what a douchebag says!
I'm pretty cheap too, but run Linux, so there's no software to pirate :)
I assume, then, that you don't use Wine?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I dust off wine every few years just to see if it'll work any better for me this time and it always ends in disappointment. I am not a fan of it.
I'd try with Gimp: much better user experience. It even beats Photoshop.