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First Net Neutrality Lawsuit Will Target Time Warner Cable
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. government's new net neutrality rules finally took effect last Friday, and a company is already using them to line up a lawsuit against Time Warner Cable. A firm called Commercial Network Services, which runs a bunch of webcams, says TWC is charging them unreasonable rates to stream video to their customers. "The [FCC's] regulations establish hard and fast rules against slowing or blocking Web traffic, as well as a ban on content companies paying for speedier service once their traffic enters a provider's network. But by design, they don't say nearly as much about how companies should negotiate the private agreements that ensure Web traffic flows smoothly into an Internet provider's network — and to your home." TWC has been arranging "settlement-free peering" with various companies, but refused such a deal with CNS. The complaint will ask the FCC to rule that ISPs must strike free peering deals with website operators.
Why can't peering be their way to implement throttling? Here's the good, bad and ugly peering point with high, medium and low prices respectively. Sure, we don't throttle the ugly hub but it's connected to the rest of our network by a dial-up via Uzbekistan, while the good hub got a 100Gbit fiber directly to our core network. If you don't have equal access to the network, you don't get equal access for the traffic. You just move the traffic discrimination to another tier.
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Wah! They're charging us for a commercial uplink!
We should get it for free! Net neutrality and all that!
Plus they've got lots of money, so we're suing.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I stand by my record. Better part of a decade as the technical lead of a regional Internet Service Provider. Frequent participant in the North American Network Operators Group. Participant in the Internet Research Task Force's Routing Research Group.
There are perhaps 100 people in the world who know these issues as well as or better than I do. You are not one of them.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Well, that's the big ISP's big lie anyway. In reality "traffic ratios" are an excuse for the "eyeball" networks (those serving consumers) to peer with each other while somehow justifying a refusal to peer with the "content" networks (those providing the movies, web pages and other content consumed).
Many networks do settlement-free peering with each other without any traffic ratios. Indeed, a shocking number of folks find it convenient to peer with google despite the lopsided ratio.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.