French ISP Throttles Direct Download Website

siliconbits contributes this snippet: "In what might be the first of many, French Internet Service Provider Orange has been caught throttling traffic to one of the world's biggest direct download websites, Megaupload. The site, which also operates Megavideo, states that Orange, which is owned by France Telecom, is preventing its users from accessing its downloading and video streaming service freely and says that it can prove it."

Legality

[biryokumaru]

Is that even illegal? I think that's the whole reason for the Net Neutrality debate here in the states, and I don't actually know if it's illegal here yet... although I may be ignorant of some more basic law there that covers this kind of thing. But have our more politically enlightened friends in France made it illegal yet?

Re:Legality

[hcs_$reboot]

Is that even illegal?

It is illegal. There are laws that protect users and allow them to access the sites they want.
If Orange is not happy with a given site, they have to follow a legal procedure to close the site, not prevent the users from accessing it.

Just plain incompetence

[Anonymous Coward]

I am working for France Telecom/Orange in a service directly involved with this problem, and I can assure you that this throttling is not true.
Actually, we had the same problem with Youtube, and at the same time other ISP had the same issue though they resolved it faster than us ... Which lead to just apologizes: yes FT/Orange is not the cutting-edge ISP and Telco it used to be; but No we are not doing it on purpose.

Peering issue...

[mariushm]

For me it looks more like Orange not wishing to do peering with Cogent and Tata, both used by Megaupload. As bandwidth through the other links costs Orange money, they probably throttle bandwidth with megaupload or something like that.

As said a thousand times ...

[McTickles]

It is a peering issue, France Telecom is trying to push OpenTransit on the market by making Level3, Cogent look bad.

Orange users can, as I told them many times before, contact the OpenTransit NOC to complain.

Working for a Tier-1

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a "Tier-1" ISP. FT (Opentransit) AS5511 is a legacy telco that has engaged in highly protective market practices. In order to interconnect within Paris (for example) they will ask that you pay them to interconnect. They also are surprised when interconnects grow full as their customers continue to seek the content that is not available on their network. I suspect they think the way about their network the way Sarkozy thinks about Renault. It's french, therefor it's offensive for content to reach france without FT being paid for it. Either the internet is going to move to a more settlement based interconnection vs the existing SFI model, or people like FT will hold their business partners and customers hostage to their own (possibly outdated) cost models.