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.

The Real Winners...

[rjune]

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