FCC gets Comcast, Verizon to reveal Netflix’s paid peering deals

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/fcc-gets-comcast-verizon-to-reveal-netflixs-paid-peering-deals/

by MBCook • 12 years ago

98 57 12 years ago

Transparency into the deals is nice, but doesn't change the fact that the deals have to exist in the first place. This seems in the same line of thinking with FCC's earlier "commercially reasonable" deals. "We'll give them fast lanes..but don't worry...the deals will be commercially reasonable...and now transparent, too".

Somehow it doesn't make me feel much better about it.

MBCook3• 12 years ago

I'm hoping this produces some good smoking guns. At least we'll know what's going on as opposed to having to infer it.

I mean if Netflix is paying Comcast $2k/month to fix the issue that's stupid but not very bad. If it's $2m/month that's a huge problem.

wmf4• 12 years ago

Netflix has "multiple terabits" of bandwidth to Comcast, so slightly under $1M/month wouldn't be a bad guess.

ColinDabritz• 12 years ago

I don't care at all how much money is being paid. So long as content providers are paying any amount, it's unequal, and needs to stop.

Net Neutrality would be a good step. Common carrier status would be better.

Spooky232• 12 years ago

This sounds like a pragmatic approach, and pragmatism has always driven internet engineering. From the ISPs perspective, Netflix's needs are diverging from a typical free peering arrangement.

The issue is, what triggers the costs? There's no good definition of what threshold requires a content provider to connect to the ISP network. Because ISPs are consolidating so rapidly, there's a huge opportunity for abuse.

msandford6• 12 years ago

"From the ISPs perspective, Netflix's needs are diverging from a typical free peering arrangement."

I would argue that point. I pay for Internet access, not "All of the Internet MINUS Netflix" access. As a result my ISP SHOULD (doesn't mean they will) ensure that all it's peering connections are of sufficient capacity to provide me with whatever bandwidth I choose to use up until I run into the rate limits for the plan I'm on.

My ISP sells me 25/5 I think so the idea that I can't get 3Mbps worth of Netflix is suspect.

Of course you have to consider that when you're not saturating your last-mile connection it could be a bottleneck anywhere. If it's 15 hops from me to a server if any of those 15 hops is saturated, that's the limiting factor no matter how much capacity there is before or after. That's why closing a single lane on a freeway for as little as 10 feet can really screw up traffic. You have to merge down and deal with reduced capacity even though it's not miles and miles of lane closure.

What we've been told via one of Netflix's backbone providers (Level 3) is that Netflix isn't the slowdown, the backbone provider isn't the slowdown, but the ISPs are the slowdown. How can they say this with certainty? Because they're peered with various ISPs, the connections are saturated, and the ISPs refuse to upgrade their side of the peering connection unless they're paid.

http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-inte...

That might sound reasonable at first brush, the ISP will incur costs associated with upgrading the peering connection. BUT so will Level 3 incur costs. So on that front they should cancel out, Level 3 pays for their side, ISP pays for their side, upgrade gets done and peering connection gets un-saturated.

Now wait, you might say, the backbone provider is pushing all this traffic on the ISP and it's not the ISP's fault that this deluge of data is headed it's way, but rather the backbone provider's fault. And there's some meat on those bones under one condition: the ISP doesn't have customers who are paying it for internet access. So that argument is not valid. The ISP's customers are the ones requesting the data that the ISP has promised to deliver and then the ISP wants to get paid twice. First by the customer for internet access, and again by the backbone provider for access to customers.

If it's so painful to provide the product to your customers that you have promised to them, perhaps you need to sell the business and get into another one. That is what literally every other company in the world does:

1. Offer to sell a thing to a customer

2. Customer agrees to buy a thing

3. Provide the thing to the customer

4. Customer pays for a thing

5. Profit!

These ISPs are so incompetent that they can't manage step 3 without getting paid extra, again, not just by a customer but also by their supplier. It boggles the mind!

chaostheory• 12 years ago

This isn't big news unless it's made public.

opendais2• 12 years ago

Well if these aren't public...

Would a FOIA request on the FCC for them since they are technically Comcast, Verizon copyright?

phantom784• 12 years ago

IANAL, but I'd imagine that they'd fall under NDAs and trade secrets rather than copyrights (although I suppose the text of a contract could be copyrightable).

Still, I'd be curious to see if a FOIA request would work.

eli• 12 years ago

Feel free to try, it don't cost nothin'.

But there's a specific exemption for: "Trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential, 5 U.S.C § 552(b)(4)"

Years ago I lost a fight with the FCC for data on cell phone carrier reliability. The FCC has great insight into who has the fastest or most reliable cell network, but as part of mandating outage reporting, Congress promised the carriers everything would stay secret.

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

Still, I'd be curious to see if a FOIA request would work.

https://muckrock.com

EDIT: I'll even give you some of my credit I have with them to use for your request.

evv2• 12 years ago

This brings to mind an interesting question: Does the FCC even have the authority to regulate net neutrality?

Even if the US government did somehow manage to regulate the US-based telcos, the FCC would have no legal way of regulating net neutrality outside of the US. An effective net neutrality policy could even harm our economy, if its a rule that nobody else needs to play by.

If we want access to a free internet, we need to figure out how to democratize the infrastructure. As long as we depend on fiber and copper controlled by big companies, net neutrality will continue to slip through our fingers like water.

wmf4• 12 years ago

Does the FCC even have the authority to regulate net neutrality?

To some extent. This was discussed extensively in the recent Verizon-FCC lawsuit.

evv2• 12 years ago

I must have missed the other discussion. I looked around the big threads but couldn't find much about FCC's authority when it comes to international networks. Feel free to link it.

On US soil with US citizens and US companies, it should be simple. But it is a complicated world in which we live, so it sounds like the FCC could only really protect equality in the best of circumstances.

For the sake of conversation, lets say the FCC isn't powerful enough. Lets say the internet is just too powerful, and there is no hope of the FCC or any other organization to regulate it. Would net neutrality be lost forever? Is it lost already?

joshAg• 12 years ago

Does the FCC even have the authority to regulate net neutrality?

It depends on how the FCC classifies the ISPs. If the FCC classifies the ISPs as a common carrier, then yes that will basically force them to honor net neutrality. Due to <politics>, the FCC has been reticent to classify the ISPs as common carriers (instead classifying them as infomation services), but it has tried to regulate them as a common carrier in some ways (but not in all ways), ie net neutrality.

Recently verizon took the fcc to court over this and the gist of the court's ruling was 'The FCC has the power to enforce net neutrality on the ISPs iff it designates the ISPs as common carriers.'

An effective net neutrality policy could even harm our economy, if its a rule that nobody else needs to play by.

An effective net neutrality rule could just as easily bolster our economy if no one else decides to play by that rule. What makes you think that net neutrality isn't a competitive advantage?

If we want access to a free internet, we need to figure out how to democratize the infrastructure.

It's hard to democratize the infrastructure because it is so expensive to keep and maintain, short of nationalizing it like the interstate system, though based on the previous paragraph I don't think that's what you meant.

esbranson3• 12 years ago

As long as we depend on fiber and copper controlled by big companies, net neutrality will continue to slip through our fingers like water.

Why do you think that?

deciplex• 12 years ago

An effective net neutrality policy could even harm our economy, if its a rule that nobody else needs to play by.

Can you expand on this? I don't see it. What does it matter to America, if Brazil allows telcos to meter speed to subscribers based on bribes paid by third parties?

kpanghmc3• 12 years ago

It affects American businesses and therefore affects the American economy.

For instance, let's say Brazil's telcos started throttling their citizens' access to Netflix, but not to Braziliflix, a hypothetical Brazilian version of Netflix. That could prevent Netflix from gaining traction in Brazil. Meanwhile, Braziliflix would be free to compete on an even playing field for customers in the US.

esbranson3• 12 years ago

How can Comcast or Verizon claim to offer you X MBps if they refuse, or are unable, to provide downloads from the Internet, including from Netflix, at X MBps? How is that not fraud or a breach of contract?

malkia• 12 years ago

Most of the time they claim "Up to X", "not X"

rando289• 12 years ago

And the only way to break that claim is to give MORE MBps than that. I think the fcc is saying "ok, let's be realistic, your 'up to' is gonna be held to a standard higher than rando48 on hacker news saying I personally guarantee internet downloads of up to 1 billion MBps to ever citizen on earth."

_greim_2• 12 years ago

If billing rates were by volume of data transferred, just like every other utility, that would incentivize ISPs to maximize data flow. But as things stand they're not incentivized to increase bandwidth because they make the same money whether you check email once a week or stream Netflix 24/7. This seems obviously broken to me, but apparently most people can't stomach the idea of paying by volume, so we're stuck with the current system.

graylights• 12 years ago

The problem with pricing by volume is that the average consumer can't really manage their volume.

Would the consumer be responsible for paying for: -DDOS (not only can you knock them offline, you can cost them big money) -Spam (Both received and botnet sent) -Retransmissions for traffic the ISP dropped due to congestion -Ads (adblockers could reduce bandwidth costs by a third)

I personally would love volume pricing. But I also would not want to provide tech support next time my parents get hit by malware and get hit with a $1000 isp bill.

jsz03• 12 years ago

The architecture of the Internet can only offer a 'best effort' class of service so it's impossible for ISPs to guarantee speeds. At best they can offer an SLA to give the customer concessions (free/discounted service) if they fail to meet the terms of the SLA.

msandford6• 12 years ago

That's true. But in this case the ISP isn't even making a good-faith effort to provide X Mbps worth of transport across their own network.

I get that once the traffic hits the broader 'net that all bets are off. That's true and nothing can be done about it.

But in this case the ISPs aren't even making a "best effort" on their own network. They're deliberately not upgrading congested links where their peering counterparties are willing to upgrade. That is not a "best effort" class of service.

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

Netflix became Level3s problem with Comcast because of unbalanced level of traffic flowing from L3 to comcast.

There is a simple solution to unbalanced Peering that Netflix could implement – just setup their clients to upload dummy garbage data at 70% max uplink speed whenever their client software is running. All of a sudden traffic will go both ways and they will be able to peer as an equal party.

This alone proves Peering agreements based on traffic amounts are a joke.

Streaming service that generates one way traffic is simply 'too nice' to comcast. Flood those asshats with /dev/random.

FCC gets Comcast, Verizon to reveal Netflix’s paid peering deals

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