Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is a frivolous suit. The net neutrality rules have nothing to do with peering, they have everything to do with throttling. There is no throttling here, only a service provider that is hosted in low grade facilities with low grade connections because they won't pay to be on major network
Technically, this has nothing to do with throttling traffic. Instead it is about TW not going out of their way to help speed up a company's traffic by providing peering.
I could see the FCC arguing that is covered too, if the ISP is providing it to anybody. I don't think the world would come crashing down if that was the ruling.
OTOH, this takes extra effort on the ISP's side, and they can't do it with everyone. If everybody is made a peer, then they'd have to put in some extra structure to handle all the peers, and eventually everybody would be right back where they started from. Either way, its certain if I started an online video business tomorrow (TEDTube), I couldn't reasonably demand TW peer me with my $0 to invest in the effort. So I'm not rich enough to demand what CNS is demanding, no matter what.
So there is going to be a limit somewhere, and it looks like CNS is trying to argue that that Net Neutrality somehow demands that the limit be moved just far enough for them to get in. There's no principle here.
Individual end users have never received settlement free peering, only major networks. The big guys occasionally kicked L3 and Cogent because they tended to have more providers than consumers on their network since they weren't part of the last mile club, but otherwise things work fairly well. Demanding that every end network be able to perform settlement free peering is insane and will lead to nothing but trouble. The biggest problem is that this kind of thing fuels an appearance that the big telcos were right and that the FCC rules are overbearing, which is unfortunate since they're just trying to rein in the worst excesses and abuses of the companies that hold hostage the future of our information based economy.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The real winners with "Net Neutrality" is the lawyers. Always the lawyers.
I can't say that I'd be in favor of net neutrality if I knew it was going to lead to some large, meaningless-except-to-the-lawyers-who-collect-cash class action lawsuits. What I really want is federal, PMITA regulation beating the hell out of telecoms whenever they decide to promote this or that service over another.
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.
While true, that's a bit misleading. A company that buys multiple pipes to multiple ISPs and has the ability to transport data across their own internal links for the benefit of their ISPs can potentially become a peer of their ISPs. The ISP is not legally obligated to grant them that status, however, and at such a point as they do so, that customer ceases to be a customer of the ISP, by definition.
Of course, a customer is only a candidate for becoming a peer of an ISP if that customer also has connections to other ISPs, and if that customer's ISP does not already have more direct peering arrangements with those other ISPs that fully meet their bandwidth needs.
And as I've said many times before, what made the Netflix deal problematic was that the ISPs provided competing services that avoided the public Internet, thus giving them an unfair competitive advantage when combined with throttling. It wasn't the throttling, nor the refusal to peer for free with Netflix that caused the problem from a legal perspective, but rather the unfair competition. Unless Commercial Network Services (AFAIK, primarily a colo/hosting provider) is similarly a competitor of TWC in some other space, this strikes me as a frivolous lawsuit that is unlikely to succeed.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Close but not quite.
Internet customer: someone who pays me to connect them to "the Internet"
Transit provider: Someone I pay to connect me to "the Internet"
Peer: Any network with whom I agree to trade packets from my own network and my Internet customers, to his network and Internet customers, and vice versa. Put another way: we agree to trade packets only for which our respective customers have paid us to transmit or receive them. Sometimes called "settlement free peering."
You'll sometimes hear the term "paid peering" but that's actually Transit above that the Internet customer chooses to use a particular way.
BGP peer: any connection between Internet networks which uses BGP, whether customer, transit or "peer." Not relevant to this discussion, but I call it out to keep the term from creeping in as if it was the same thing as "peering."
Peering is most definitely a net neutrality issue. When one network refuses to peer with another, they force the other network to either take the long way around (throttling) or to pay for transit service (paid prioritization).
There's room for nuance here. There's no suggestion that one network must peer in exactly the manner another wants to. Or that one network must pay the direct costs of connecting with another just because the other wants to. But a flat refusal to peer based on some arbitrary and capricious measurement of the other network's nature is most emphatically a net neutrality violation.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
PEER - two transit providers who connect to each other (they are peers in the industry)
No,
PEER - two networks who connect to each other to provide themselves and their customers (if any) with access to each other and each others customers (if any). Those networks may or may not be in the buisness of selling transit on the open market. Google, netflix, the BBC and so-on all have plenty of peers.
ISPs who are in the buisness of providing high quality service to their customers (as many smaller providers are) and/or who have to buy transit to reach large parts of the internet (again as many smaller providers are) are motivated to peer as widely as reasonablly possible (obviously there has to be some threshold below which the administative cost of setting up the peering aren't worth it). Content providers are also generally motivated to peer as widely as possible.
On the other hand large monpolistic ISPs see a refusal to peer or deliberately shitty peering as a means to force content providers to become customers.
Which brings us to the root of the problem, the US has let ISPs get far too large through allowing vertical integration of last mile infrastructure with ISP service and through allowing cable companies in different areas to merge into a handful of monoliths. The FCC is trying to paper over the consequences without solving the real problem.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It's always cheaper for the ISP to send and receive a third party's packets via a network that's paying them than via a network which isn't. Indeed, it has a -negative- cost.
Here's where the line should be drawn: if I'm willing to pay your direct costs for establishing a peering connection to me, that is I bring a line to a location you find convenient, pay reasonable equipment costs and pay for a couple of hours of your engineers' time, and you still say no peering then you've breached network neutrality.
There's a couple nuances to that which I'm skipping for the sake of clarity, but in large there it is.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.