First Net Neutrality Lawsuit Will Target Time Warner Cable 88
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.
Frivolous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Frivolous (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Frivolous (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that's the big ISP's big lie anyway. In reality "traffic ratios" are an excuse for the "eyeball" networks (those serving consumers) to peer with each other while somehow justifying a refusal to peer with the "content" networks (those providing the movies, web pages and other content consumed).
Many networks do settlement-free peering with each other without any traffic ratios. Indeed, a shocking number of folks find it convenient to peer with google despite the lopsided ratio.
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Outbound traffic is much cheaper than inbound traffic. You can dump outbound traffic off at the nearest meeting point with its destination network. But you have to carry inbound traffic from wherever the source network gives it to you.
With a typical traffic imbalance, when a server on the West Coast is talking to a client on the East Coast, the client's network is carrying much more of the traffic across the country.
Think about it like the US post office and the German post office agreeing to exchange packa
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Outbound traffic is much cheaper than inbound traffic. You can dump outbound traffic off at the nearest meeting point with its destination network. But you have to carry inbound traffic from wherever the source network gives it to you.
That's a half-truth.
At any connection with the source network, you advertise the destinations you're willing to accept traffic for. Nothing requires you to accept packets for your entire global network at every location where you interconnect; that's something you choose (or choose not) to do.
Sending packets for destinations you did not advertise has long been deemed a violation of any peering agreement, subjecting the transgressor to disconnection.
Likewise, most service providers respect the destination ne
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"The Internet is a meet-in-the-middle system in which both sender and receiver pay to reach any of the midpoints where packets are exchanged. Regardless of any ratios, the packets transiting those interconnects have already been paid for in both directions."
No, it's not. That's what some people want it to be, but that's not what it is, nor has it been that way for many decades. A free market did *not* build a meet-in-the-middle system because that unfairly advantages business that can choose their endpoints
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At any connection with the source network, you advertise the destinations you're willing to accept traffic for. Nothing requires you to accept packets for your entire global network at every location where you interconnect; that's something you choose (or choose not) to do.
Nothing requires you to, but it is best practice to do so. Hard for a route to fail over if you don't preemptively advertise your network everywhere.
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It's not "somehow justifying", the justification is quite clear. We presume the traffic benefits both parties equally, thus each party should be about half the cost. Content networks put their servers wherever it's cheapest to put traffic on the Internet while eyeball networks have to take their customers where they find them. Thus, without settlement, eyeball networks would pay more than half the cost of the traffic, which would be unfair. Settlement-based peering splits the costs to match the benefits.
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That sounds so reasonable. Just one problem: those customers you took where you found them paid you to take them where you found them and connect them to the Content networks. Refusing to provide that paid-for service (or throttling it) until the Content networks _also_ pay you is fraudulent double-billing.
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They are providing the service the customers paid for -- half the work in exchanging their traffic with the rest of the Internet, with the other half to be covered by the other network.
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But they will need to show that it is TWC's fault, which isn't obvious from the article.
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They offered to peer. TWC refused. Game, set, match.
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That's the spin anyway. Ask any network cut out of the peering process (which is most of them) whether not they "accept" the practice.
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Sure, folks like Google and Netflix who are trying to shift their share of the costs of their traffic onto companies like Time Warner and Comcast are unhappy about the practice. That's why they want the government to "fix" a functional free market that has been working amazingly well for decades.
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In a functional free market, Time Warner and Comcast would be paying Netflix the same way they pay ABC and CBS. Let's not have any delusions about the current monopoly/duopoly state of affairs being a functional free market.
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That is dumb beyond words. Netflix charges the customers directly. ABC and CBS don't. They're completely different business models by the content providers.
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Well Google, Microsoft, and Cox already signed up so CNS expects the same kind of deal with TWC.
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Peering IS an Internet "fast lane," at least in a coarse sense. Your paying customers have the most favorable data rates in to and out of your network. Next come your reciprocal peers. Finally, you keep the connections you have to pay for at the highest congestion levels in order to minimize your cost.
By refusing peering to a third party, you force them to either pay you or suffer degraded data rates through your paid channel. This is throttling.
Re:Frivolous (Score:4, Informative)
Peering IS an Internet "fast lane," at least in a coarse sense. Your paying customers have the most favorable data rates in to and out of your network. Next come your reciprocal peers. Finally, you keep the connections you have to pay for at the highest congestion levels in order to minimize your cost.
You clearly don't understand the internet.
Peering (as opposed to transit) is two private networks deciding that they exchange enough traffic that it justifies the capex and opex of a dedicated network port or dedicated peering session between the two networks.
If large network A already sees small network B through peering with large network C (in which case usually B is a customer of C), there is little reason for A to peer with B unless bi-directional traffic reaches certain levels. Those levels are part of network A's peering policy.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality.
By refusing peering to a third party, you force them to either pay you or suffer degraded data rates through your paid channel. This is throttling.
Total and utter bullshit, and FUD originating from Netflix etc in their "peering dispute" with Comcast. Network B can purchase enough bandwidth from network C. If there is an issue with bandwidth between network B and network A, they will figure it out and add additional ports.
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I stand by my record. Better part of a decade as the technical lead of a regional Internet Service Provider. Frequent participant in the North American Network Operators Group. Participant in the Internet Research Task Force's Routing Research Group.
There are perhaps 100 people in the world who know these issues as well as or better than I do. You are not one of them.
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Right. Regional monopoly/duopoly ISPs have the power to compel double-billing, in which they collect money from two different customers for each packet that transits their network. This "saves" them a considerable amount of money.
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Well, the packet benefits both the sender and the recipient. It makes sense that each of them should bear about half the costs.
When Google sends a packet to a Comcast customer, we presume that packet benefits both Google and Comcast equally. So Google should pay half the cost and Comcast should pay half the cost. With no settlement, Google will pay much less than half the cost, because Google can put their servers where it's cheapest and Comcast has to take their customers where they find them. So Comcast c
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Your reasoning does not make sense. If each packet benefits each side equally then the benefit from all of the packets is exactly equal. Direction ratios, length of travel and phase of the moon are all irrelevant bits of information that don't apply to the question.
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I agree, the benefit of all the packets is exactly equal.
I'm saying that because the benefits are equal, the costs should be equal too.
For example, say two national networks peer and there's much more outbound traffic from A to B than from B to A. That means that even though the benefits to both networks are equal the costs will be much higher to B because it has a larger length of travel. So thus it makes sense to equalize the costs by having A pay B.
Or say Google is going to exchange traffic with Comcast.
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I stand by my record. Better part of a decade as the technical lead of a regional Internet Service Provider. Frequent participant in the North American Network Operators Group. Participant in the Internet Research Task Force's Routing Research Group.
Bill, you should know that peering has nothing to do with CoS (fast lanes). Peering is about two networks agreeing to directly exchange traffic when that makes operational and business sense. When Snake Oil Inc with a /19 and 5000 dsl subs wants to peer with Cogent, I will guarantee you that they will be redirected to the sales department. And justly so.
If you're advocating that unless one peers with everyone who sends a peering request, one is violating "net neutrality", you really need to go back to net
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Verizon doesn't have any paid transit at all. They have only peers and customers. They're one of a handful of "transit-free" backbone networks, sometimes mislabelled as "tier 1."
Verizon refused to upgrade the network ports with the peer serving Netflix. They let it congest until Netflix's service stopped working (along with everything else via that peer). They then kindly offered to let Netflix pay for a direct connection.
You don't think that's throttling and paid prioritization?
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And, not, technically speaking, that is not throttling and paid prioritization. It may be in spirit, I don't deny that, but it's also something that you can't really police. You can't force companies to upgrade all of their peers to maximum incoming and out
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I take it you didn't bother to read the FCC's rule? Charging more for higher bandwidth is against the FCC's rule.
Yeah, no doubt what they really meant was throttling. However, what they WROTE applies to pretty much any tiered service that your ISP provides ($50 for 5GB/sec, $100 for 8GB/sec - that's charging more for higher bandwidth!!!). Including this particular case....
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adult webcams?
That's how I read it.
- Non-descriptive, generic company name -- check.
- Hosts lots of cameras for outside access -- check.
- Viewers are paying customers -- check
PEERING is for PEERS (Score:1)
Some terms:
CUSTOMER - the entity that wants to be connected to the Internet
TRANSIT provider - connects the Customer to the Internet
PEER - two transit providers who connect to each other (they are peers in the industry)
SETTLEMENT-FREE peering (also "free peering") is when two (or more) transit porivders exchange a similar amount of ingress/egress traffic. It benefits both to do so at private peering points vs transitting their own long-haul networks.
CUSTOMERS are not PEERS of their TRANSIT PROVIDER. (To p
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It's always cheaper for the ISP to send and receive a third party's packets via a network that's paying them than via a network which isn't. Indeed, it has a -negative- cost.
Here's where the line should be drawn: if I'm willing to pay your direct costs for establishing a peering connection to me, that is I bring a line to a location you find convenient, pay reasonable equipment costs and pay for a couple of hours of your engineers' time, and you still say no peering then you've breached network neutrality.
T
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While true, that's a bit misleading. A company that buys multiple pipes to multiple ISPs and has the ability to transport data across their own internal links for the benefit of their ISPs can potentially become a peer of their ISPs. The ISP is not legally obligated to grant them that status, however, and at such a point as they do so, that customer ceases to be a customer of the ISP,
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Close but not quite.
Internet customer: someone who pays me to connect them to "the Internet"
Transit provider: Someone I pay to connect me to "the Internet"
Peer: Any network with whom I agree to trade packets from my own network and my Internet customers, to his network and Internet customers, and vice versa. Put another way: we agree to trade packets only for which our respective customers have paid us to transmit or receive them. Sometimes called "settlement free peering."
You'll sometimes hear the term "pa
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PEER - two transit providers who connect to each other (they are peers in the industry)
No,
PEER - two networks who connect to each other to provide themselves and their customers (if any) with access to each other and each others customers (if any). Those networks may or may not be in the buisness of selling transit on the open market. Google, netflix, the BBC and so-on all have plenty of peers.
ISPs who are in the buisness of providing high quality service to their customers (as many smaller providers are) a
Kinda on the fence about this (Score:3)
Technically, this has nothing to do with throttling traffic. Instead it is about TW not going out of their way to help speed up a company's traffic by providing peering [wikipedia.org].
I could see the FCC arguing that is covered too, if the ISP is providing it to anybody. I don't think the world would come crashing down if that was the ruling.
OTOH, this takes extra effort on the ISP's side, and they can't do it with everyone. If everybody is made a peer, then they'd have to put in some extra structure to handle all the peers, and eventually everybody would be right back where they started from. Either way, its certain if I started an online video business tomorrow (TEDTube), I couldn't reasonably demand TW peer me with my $0 to invest in the effort. So I'm not rich enough to demand what CNS is demanding, no matter what.
So there is going to be a limit somewhere, and it looks like CNS is trying to argue that that Net Neutrality somehow demands that the limit be moved just far enough for them to get in. There's no principle here.
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And so it begins. Except a lot of crap like this to happen, and expect your costs to rise in response. Lawsuits are expensive. Being forced to offer agreements to anyone who comes along is expensive. Being unable to throttle traffic, especially abusive traffic, means that either they spend a ton of money to upgrade everything (they won't) or your service will suffer.
All of you people who thought this was such a great idea, rainbows and unicorns, you just wait.
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And so it begins. Except a lot of crap like this to happen, and expect your costs to rise in response.
Nope. I expect my costs will go down, just as soon as I can convince the FCC that my home network should be eligible for a settlement-free peering arrangement with my local ISP. ;-P
Captcha: directly
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Peering only connects you to the other network's customers, not to the Internet at large.
You'd still have to pay someone to connect you to the other 99% of the Internet.
You'd still have to pay for the network line that connects your house to the location where your ISP does its peering.
Compulsory peering just means that when your ISP's customers have paid for access to "the Internet" and you offer to provide the ISP a direct connection to your part of "the Internet," the ISP has an obligation to service its
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Almost none of the public peering points employ multilateral peering agreements (MPLAs). Instead, you sit on the same ethernet switch that they do but must then negotiate a unilateral peering agreement with each network willing to peer.
A few smaller networks have "open" peering agreements. This means they'll accept an offer to peer with anyone else connected to the switch. Most have closed peering agreements, which means that the peer must meet some arbitrary criteria or they won't talk with you via the pe
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That would be MLPA, not MPLA. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dyslexic.
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TFA is about peering at public interconnection points so cost should be minimal. Whats interesting is Charters peering policy is very open and allows even for regional peering at public points, hopefully that will continue be the case if the TWC merger happens.
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Instead it is about TW not going out of their way to help speed up a company's traffic by providing peering.
While at the same time going out of their way to speed up any company's traffic who pays them (including offering to speed up this company's for the right fee). Paid prioritization and throttling are two sides of the same coin. Either violates net neutrality.
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There's a little nuance, but that's basically correct: TWC should have to do this for anyone who asks.
Nuance:
Peer where? TWC gets to pick the location and it isn't fair to require TWC to pay to connect from that location to yours. That's an expense you either pay for or negotiate.
Peer with how much of TWC's network? We're not talking about a single city here, TWC serves many mainland communities and large swaths of Hawaii too. Even if you connect at their favored location, should they be required to shuttle
WTF? (Score:3)
Individual end users have never received settlement free peering, only major networks. The big guys occasionally kicked L3 and Cogent because they tended to have more providers than consumers on their network since they weren't part of the last mile club, but otherwise things work fairly well. Demanding that every end network be able to perform settlement free peering is insane and will lead to nothing but trouble. The biggest problem is that this kind of thing fuels an appearance that the big telcos were right and that the FCC rules are overbearing, which is unfortunate since they're just trying to rein in the worst excesses and abuses of the companies that hold hostage the future of our information based economy.
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Nonsense. Small networks frequently peer with each other, even as they're locked out of peering in the big boys' club. And for your information, the arbitrary and capricious standards for joining the boys' club IS one of the worst excesses and abuses of the companies that hold hostage the future of our information based economy.
The Real Winners... (Score:5, Informative)
The real winners with "Net Neutrality" is the lawyers. Always the lawyers.
They keep using that word... (Score:2)
The complaint will ask the FCC to rule that ISPs must strike free peering deals with website operators.
Big pockets? New law? I smell a class action... (Score:3)
I can't say that I'd be in favor of net neutrality if I knew it was going to lead to some large, meaningless-except-to-the-lawyers-who-collect-cash class action lawsuits. What I really want is federal, PMITA regulation beating the hell out of telecoms whenever they decide to promote this or that service over another.
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Who knew that incredibly vague rules about a non-problem could lead to exploitation by lawyers?
Wah! They're charging us for access! (Score:4, Interesting)
Wah! They're charging us for a commercial uplink!
We should get it for free! Net neutrality and all that!
Plus they've got lots of money, so we're suing.
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Wah! I'm an idiot who doesn't understand the difference between Transit (uplink) and peering and can't be bothered to learn.
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Peering is nothing more than a dedicated uplink with higher bandwidth capacity than that normally provisioned, and private between two networks.
There is absolutely no reason some piddly little site should expect to be given a peering arrangement just because they think they're being charged too much for a commercial link. Bandwidth is bandwidth, and there is NOTHING about "net neutrality" thar forces ISPs to peer with anybody.
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Peering is not an uplink at all. It has different characteristics.
Internet Transit service (that uplink) connects you with the rest of the Internet. It's expansive. It connects you to "everything."
Peering connects you with your neighbor and his paying customers. Nothing else, just the folks who have paid your neighbor to connect them with "the Internet."
Are you comprehending the difference? One connects you with everything, even when the ISP has to pay for it. The other connects you only to folks who have a
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And, by the way, this "idiot" wrote backbone internet and billing software for some small companies you may have heard of: Northern Telecom and AT&T. I've been around a long, long time and been the bowels of systems and corporations whose operations dwarf what most people have dealt with.
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*LOL* "been in the bowels"
Mind you, some of the jobs were pretty shitty. :P
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Which AT&T? The rebranded Cingular or the old one that collapsed to nothing allowing Cingular to buy them? Nortel, of course is in bankruptcy. And you wrote the software that managed their money you say? Did it round off the pennies?
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I think that certain traffic is slowed/delayed to give people the impression they need a faster link.
The traffic that takes the longest to get to me is the 47 pages of included javascript someone convinced a web site creator to use. My page load times would be greatly reduced without all that extra garbage.
TWC's Peering policy (Score:2)
I've read through a number of peering agreements over the last year, and this is one of the most onerous and one-sided that I've seen. Mandating minimum connection speeds that are out of the realm of all but probably the 20-30 largest carriers in the world, minimum of 8 POPs with 4 of them in distinct regions peering with TWC, must have at least 500 downstream AS's, and must be advertising 2000+
Definitely taking the stance of they have everything to