Legislation Would Prohibit ISPs From Throttling Online Video Services

Dega704 sends this story from Ars: "A Senate bill called the 'Consumer Choice in Online Video Act' (PDF) takes aim at many of the tactics Internet service providers can use to overcharge customers and degrade the quality of rival online video services. Submitted yesterday by U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the 63-page bill provides a comprehensive look at the potential ways in which ISPs can limit consumer choice, and it boots the Federal Communications Commission's power to prevent bad outcomes. 'It shall be unlawful for a designated Internet service provider to engage in unfair methods of competition or unfair or deceptive acts or practices, the purpose or effect of which are to hinder significantly or to prevent an online video distributor from providing video programming to a consumer,' the bill states. A little more specifically, it would be illegal to 'block, degrade, or otherwise impair any content provided by an online video distributor' or 'provide benefits in the transmission of the video content of any company affiliated with the Internet service provider through specialized services or other means.' Those provisions overlap a bit with the FCC's authority under its own net neutrality law, the Open Internet Order, which already prevents the blockage of websites and services. However, Verizon is in court attempting to kill that law, and there is a real possibility that it could be limited in some way. The Consumer Choice in Online Video Act could provide a hedge against that possible outcome."

Re:Not going to happen

[girlintraining]

all i can think about is time warner and youtube. all youtube videos are throttled so horribly with time warner that i cant even watch 480p. time warner also cuts off the buffering after a certain amount of time, so you cant just leave it buffering all day either.

That's why when I browse Youtube, I use a plugin that lets me download the .mp4 files raw... then they can throttle all they want. I just have 20x connections going at a time. Because fuck you Time Warner, that's why.

Re:Not going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

time warner also cuts off the buffering after a certain amount of time, so you cant just leave it buffering all day either

I see that happening too, not on Time Warner, and assumed it was a youtube bandwidth-cost-savings-feature. Youtube doesn't want to send you data that you might never even watch.

Re:Not going to happen

[CastrTroy]

I don't think that's Time Warner. I'm with Rogers here in Canada, and I get the same experience. I've heard similar complaints from people with all kinds of ISPs. Basically the problem, as far as I know, is that Youtube is broken. Youtube tries to cut down on network usage, so they try to stream it to you just fast enough so that you only ever have a minimal amount in the buffer. The problem comes when the connection fails, or you sneeze, or it's tuesday, and the stream slows down just a bit. This causes your buffer to empty, which makes the video stop. There' also major problems with them reconnecting to the stream. Once the connection is dropped, or the buffer is empty, you pretty much have to reload the whole page before it can start streaming the video again. I spent 20 minutes trying to watch the last 10 minutes of a 1 hour video last weekend because this was happening continuously. I can watch videos all day every day with any other streaming service, but for some reason, Youtube just can't get it's act together.

No such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

How about managing bandwidth by setting throughput and/or total transfer limits, and then letting me use it on whatever kind of data I want to? It's nobody's business what kind of data I'm sending through the pipe I paid for.

Re:Reasonable throttling

[Agent.Nihilist]

I think you misread that a bit.
Both the 10 minute buffer and the 48 minute buffer can hit play and start watching immediately. The example is an hour long video, the difference being the 10 minute download used 5 times the bandwidth for the same end effect, meaning in a bandwidth limited scenario that user prevent 5 other users from being able to do the same thing.

That's the basis of the idea, allowing throttling that doesn't effect playback, but prevents spikes in usage from preventing others the same access.

Competition takes three.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Now a 3rd option is in my area. Haven't noticed any throtteling on Netflix or Youtube. Even a test torrent worked just fine.

Part of the problem is that the government defines "competition" (especially in communication regulation, ever since the initial rollout of analog cellphone service) as starting with two competitors. It writes regulations that stop pushing for competition at two.

As I understand it, with two "competitors", rational pricing optmization algorithms actually drive them to splitting the customer base about equally with a high profit margin. No collusion is necessary - the price and market share transmit enough information to drive the effect.

With four or more you're virtually certain to get somebody squeezed into a small market share but still able to survive. His best strategy, near term, is to compete with a low price or better price:performance ratio and grab market share. This starts a price or price:performance war that drives the market price toward cost plus a livable profit margin and/or makes the better service necessary for market survival. By the time this settles out the little guy is usually a big enough guy that he doesn't get squeezed out.

With three competitors the high profit / low service level equilibrium is somewhat unstable, so it might go any of several ways (three gougers, squeeze out the little guy, or {usually} the price/service war).