FCC Looking Into Paid Peering Deals

An anonymous reader writes The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced on Friday that it has successfully obtained the details regarding paid peering deals between Netflix and Comcast as well as Verizon and is working to obtain similar information for other video streamers and their respective ISP peers. The FCC's goal is, as they pointed out themselves, not to regulate as yet but to examine these deals with the goal of providing some transparency to the American public regarding the internet services they pay for. Verizon and Comcast issued statements expressing their willingness to be open about their peering activities and stressed that no regulation is required. The peering market 'has functioned effectively and efficiently for over two decades without government intervention,' Comcast claimed at a congressional hearing. The Free Press policy director nevertheless points out that 'when the FCC required reporting from AT&T after the company blocked Skype in 2009 and Google Voice in 2012, the disclosures revealed that AT&T was indeed misleading its customers.'

Comments

No fault found

[symbolset]

Tom Wheeler's FCC is not going to do anything helpful for end users.

Re:No fault found

[PopeRatzo]

Tom Wheeler's FCC is not going to do anything helpful for end users.

That's not his job. His job is to maximize profits for a small number of corporations. Profits that will come out of the hides of a population already in difficult straits from the financial terrorism of the 2000s.

The people who are pulling the strings of our society are dead-enders. They have a vision for a glorious future that does not include you and me.

Tom Wheeler is Reason #1438 that Barack Obama is the worst president in the last half-century. What's worse is that he made me look bad because I voted for that feckless sonofabitch. But I'd rather admit my failure than pretend otherwise. That's the only way to learn, you know?

Re:No fault found

[mcgrew]

Tom Wheeler is Reason #1438 that Barack Obama is the worst president in the last half-century.

Do you think Romney or McCain would have appointed anyone better? And "worst President in 50 years?" Dude, when he took office the country had its largest budget deficit in history, the economy was in its worst shape since the Great Depression, and we were fighting two wars. Now the economy has improved greatly although it has a long way to go, particularly among working people, the unemployment rate is lower than when he took office, one war is over and the other will be over in a year, two states have legalized marijuana and he hasn't siced the DEA on them, and he gets no help whatever from Congress.

Contrast that with his predecessor, who took office in boom times and left it in the worst recession since the great depression, ignored the previous administration's warnings and his own FBI agent's reports and got our country attacked, started the longest war in our history and then started another completely senseless war that has resulted in Civil War there, rammed through the misnamed PATRIOT act, started the TSA and all the NSA bullshit Obama is (rightly) condemned for using, rammed through "No Chid Left Behind" which should have been "Leave them ALL behind"... name ONE positive thing Bush did for this country? Obamacare is a clusterfuck, but it's better than what we had.

Bush was the worst President in my 62 year lifetime and likely the worst in history. No other President damaged our country (indeed, the whole world) as badly as Bush.

Hell, with the exception of Bush, Carter was the worst president in fifty years. IMO the only decent President I've seen since Eisenhower was Clinton, who turned HW's recession into a boom, presided over the end of generational welfare, took office with until then was history's largest deficit and left office with a balanced budget, and put 100,000 more cops on the streets... coincidence that the crime rate started dropping then?

Wake up, friend. Both parties suck, and neither produce very good lawmakers or executives.

Re:No fault found

[PopeRatzo]

I had forgotten about the Carter foodstamps thing.

As far as McCain sounding "reasonable", I have to disagree:

http://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCa...

Transparent as Glass. Steagall.

[rmdingler]

Verizon and Comcast issued statements expressing their willingness to be open about their peering activities and stressed that no regulation is required.

Well hell, as long as the for-profit corporations are on record promising there's nothing to see here, what's all the fuss?

Yeah

[alzoron]

They keep saying that additional regulation will degrade service, raise prices and reduce healthy competition, yet the United States has some of the worst prices, service and competition with the little regulation that already exists. I don't see how adding additional regulation at this point is going to make things any worse unless modems and routers will start spontaneously catching on fire or service technicians are going to start shooting people's dogs.

Re:Yeah

[Charliemopps]

They keep saying that additional regulation will degrade service, raise prices and reduce healthy competition, yet the United States has some of the worst prices, service and competition with the little regulation that already exists. I don't see how adding additional regulation at this point is going to make things any worse unless modems and routers will start spontaneously catching on fire or service technicians are going to start shooting people's dogs.

In the case of the Cable companies (not telecoms) they are basically not regulated at all. So yes, some regulation would have little impact and improve service. In regards to Telecoms, regulation is VERY heavy. It's a significant portion of their operating costs and a lot of it is just plain stupid. It could probably use more regulation in 'some' areas but needs a significant reduction in others.

The biggest problem in the US is our government and the FCC are completely incompetent. Rudimentary basic reforms would solve a lot of our problems. We're still operating under regulation that was, for the most part, developed prior to the Internet. It's literally a completely different industry now. It's unrecognizable compared to what we had in the 80s. So why are we still using that same regulation?

We need what we buy defined, in law. i.e. "You'll have 5mb/s service 60% of the time, minimum degraded level of 500k/s" or whatever. So you know what you're getting. This should be enforced by weights and measures.
Content providers need to be regulated. Netflix in particular has been operating in a completely irresponsible way. Don't regulate what they can provide. Regulate how they provide it. You can't move a 10gig peer overnight without telling anyone.
All ISPs need to operate under the same regulatory framework. No more pretending Cable and Telephone provide different products. They don't.
Get rid of all the nonsense like regional laws that require working pots lines in abandon homes. Most state and federal buildings dont even have pay-phones anymore, why should an abandon home? If the states not willing to pay for it, why should the ISP have to?

Common sense rule changes would do us all a lot of good.

Sign me up already

[troll -1]

http://jointhefastlane.com/

Re:If it's paid

[Tim the Gecko]

This is the common definition:

• Settlement free peering: Doesn't take money from you. Advertises their routes to you. Advertises your routes to their customers.
• Paid peering: Takes money from you. Advertises their routes to you. Advertises your routes to their customers.
• Transit: Takes money from you. Advertises the whole Internet routing table to you. Advertises your routes to their customers and peers.

You will see that there is no technical difference between settlement free and paid. It's the same router configuration. The money flow is just the end result of the poker game of which peer needs the other more.