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.

Comments

Frivolous

[bhcompy]

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

Re:Frivolous

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Frivolous

[sabri]

Peering IS an Internet "fast lane," at least in a coarse sense. Your paying customers have the most favorable data rates in to and out of your network. Next come your reciprocal peers. Finally, you keep the connections you have to pay for at the highest congestion levels in order to minimize your cost.

You clearly don't understand the internet.

Peering (as opposed to transit) is two private networks deciding that they exchange enough traffic that it justifies the capex and opex of a dedicated network port or dedicated peering session between the two networks.

If large network A already sees small network B through peering with large network C (in which case usually B is a customer of C), there is little reason for A to peer with B unless bi-directional traffic reaches certain levels. Those levels are part of network A's peering policy.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality.

By refusing peering to a third party, you force them to either pay you or suffer degraded data rates through your paid channel. This is throttling.

Total and utter bullshit, and FUD originating from Netflix etc in their "peering dispute" with Comcast. Network B can purchase enough bandwidth from network C. If there is an issue with bandwidth between network B and network A, they will figure it out and add additional ports.

Re:Frivolous

[Spazmania]

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.

The Real Winners...

[rjune]

The real winners with "Net Neutrality" is the lawyers. Always the lawyers.

Wah! They're charging us for access!

[msobkow]

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.