Reason To Hope Carriers Won't Win the War On Netflix 213
Nemo the Magnificent writes "A few days ago we talked over a post by David Raphael accusing Verizon of slowing down Netflix, by way of throttling Amazon AWS. Now Jonathan Feldman gives us reason to believe that the carriers won't win the war on Netflix, because tools for monitoring the performance of carriers will emerge nd we'll catch them if they try. I just now exercised one such tool, NetNeutralityTest.com from Speedchedker Ltd. My carrier is Verizon (FiOS), and the test showed my download speed at the moment to be 12 Mbps. It was the same to Linode in NJ but only 3 Mbps to AWS East. Hmm."
Re:Sure, Netflix is safe, what about the rest? (Score:5, Interesting)
if (trafficSource != VerzionOnDemand && trafficSource != Netflix) {
degradePerformance(); //slightly and randomly degrades performance
}
Seems relatively easy from a logic point of view.
Would anyone notice if they randomly started dropping UDP packets? Your average web user would see pages load just as fast. Statistical analysis would have to be very large scale and long term to notice a trend that couldn't be attributed to the normal fluctuations of speed and reliability of the internet. But home users could get a subtle difference in viewing experience for video from their ISP and a competitor.
In reality, ISPs simply need to slack on peering arrangements so their competitors are hammered during peak usage. Something Verizon has already been accused of.
This all leads me to think the real problem is the vertical monopoly/integration of ISP and content provider. If the government doesnt step in, we'll continue to see this war over and over just with ever shifting battlefields. Even with common carrier, we would likely still have ISPs pulling these tricks. regardless of whether they can charge Netflix more.
*obviously it's more complicated than the pseudo code above
Re:Wait. what? (Score:2, Interesting)
The FCC made the decision on how to classify internet service providers which lead to this being an option. When they tried to take back just part of their decision the courts said it they didn't have the authority due to how they classified ISPs. They still have the option of going back and reclassifying ISPs to give themselves the authority to enforce neutrality.
So yes we are blaming the FCC because they made the mess and thus far has refused to do what they have to (and the courts say need to and are legally able to) do to fix the problem for good.