
Verizon Using Recent Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix? - ceterumnet
http://davesblog.com/blog/2014/02/05/verizon-using-recent-net-neutrality-victory-to-wage-war-against-netflix/
======
padseeker
How do we, IT savvy people capable of monitoring, testing and verifying this
stuff, use our collective skills to monitor each ISP and communicate who is
doing the best/worst job?

As long as there is at least one ISP provider who is not throttling traffic,
we should reward that ISP that does not discriminate on web traffic, and
punish the ones that do. You might have to show some differences across
different regions and cities, but this is critical. I don't know enough about
monitoring web traffic to figure this out but it sounds like an awesome
project to spearhead. How do we get started?

It's just that I'm just a little sick of the finger pointing, and would prefer
to do whatever I could to fix the problem or use the markets to promote the
good companies and punish the bad ones. If there is a market where all the ISP
providers are throttling then you have a better case for government
regulation. Who's with me?

~~~
mweinbergPK
As someone who is in DC doing net neutrality advocacy on a daily basis, I love
this question. One of our major challenges is that ISPs have data on their
networks and we don't. That leaves us in a position to speculate about what is
"really" happening and hoping that someone out there happens to have the
technical skills to potentially uncover a problem. The HN community's ability
to evaluate claims made by ISPs as legitimate or illegitimate based on
technical constraints is incredibly valuable.

~~~
ajb
Interestingly though, there is an argument that even ISPs don't have the
_right_ data, and that this is a reason - or at least an excuse - for
throttling. See [http://www.bobbriscoe.net/presents/1005ftw/1005ftw-
briscoe.p...](http://www.bobbriscoe.net/presents/1005ftw/1005ftw-briscoe.pdf)
There is an ietf working group (ConEx) on exposing the kind of information
necessary, with the idea that this would provide the right kind of incentives
for ISPs not to throttle. I'm not sure that ISPs wouldn't anyway have the
incentive to be a gatekeeper, but it would be a good idea to remove any
possible excuse.

~~~
kriswill
Or, you could refer to the product you're interested in buying, as they can
provide information about how well different internet providers can service
their product:

[http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/results/usa/graph](http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/results/usa/graph)

------
colinbartlett
I would not take some offhanded remark from an outsourced, minimum wage,
offshore worker as confirmation of anything.

~~~
RyanZAG
By far the most correct observation. These guys are just following a script -
they probably don't even know what half of the words mean. Please don't read
anything into it or assume the outsourced support is somehow privy to anything
at all that goes on inside Verizon other than what the FAQ system he's using
tells him on screen.

~~~
waps
The netflix data itself points to a gradual lowering of bandwidth to their
service. Now here's 2 scenarios :

1) Verizon decided to enter some router configurations that affect the packet
forwarding to Netflix (well, most likely FROM netflix, as the internet is not
actually symmetrical). What we should see as a result of this is a sudden
change in bandwidth.

2) The load on the interfaces in between is changing, either because of more
netflix subscribers, more AWS traffic, or more netflix traffic. Since these
are things happening slowly over time, you'd see a gradual worsening of
traffic conditions.

I think it's pretty fucking likely that what's happening here is 2). Now
granted, Verizon could solve this problem by cooperating with Netflix. But for
them that's an expense with no upside, so likely they're demanding Netflix
make it worth their while to upgrade the interconnects.

This is one of the basic problems with the internet today. It used to be the
case that bandwidth between providers was much more plentiful than last-mile
bandwidth. So we upgraded last-mile bandwidth. Problem : doing that resulted
in an exponential increase in load on the core network and the interconnects
between different networks. Needless to say, nobody can keep up with
exponentially rising demands (especially without subscriber growth). The basic
problem is that a linear increase in bandwidth for the customer results in an
exponential increase in costs for the ISP (so -surpise- small ISPs don't feel
the effects nearly as badly).

So ISPs are desperate. Their costs are spiralling out of control, with
everyone demanding they follow this exponential curve, but of course their
customers not willing to pay for it (and all the money in the world would only
buy time if thrown at this problem). Demanding the ISPs pay for it is simply
not going to work. Right now, yes, they could theoretically pay for it, but
that won't last long.

Plus Netflix is being a rather bad netizen themselves. The polite thing to do
is to carry the traffic to very close to the user on your own network, and
only use other's links, especially transit, as a last resort ("cold-potato"
routing, for content providers). Netflix has caches, but no own network.

There's other problems that result from this cost problem. Already
transcontinental and other long-haul links are strained to the limit. This has
resulted in a massive degradation of non-local internet traffic, and it's
getting worse fast.

It is really a very simple problem. You have consumers, and you have
producers. And you get more and more of each. To a limited approximation you
can assume everyone on the internet is both. To simplify things, let's say
everyone uses a tiny amount of everyone else's services. Now given N
participants in the network, what is the load on the core network ?

N * (N - 1) =~ N^2 (assuming full duplex links, which would be generally
correct for the internet)

So adding more participants in the internet increases resources required to
give every existing participant in the network his "old" speed. These need to
be paid for. But unless everyone want to start paying an amount for your
internet connections that rises with the square of the size of the internet,
we're going to see progressively worse and worse throttling. Right now the
strategy is fast becoming limiting interconnect capacity to prevent the core
network overloading, which would have far worse consequences.

While, yes, historically this has mostly been monopolies cheating the market,
that's less and less true. This is going to get worse, fast. And since those
resources are obviously not going to be made available, there's only one thing
to say :

Get used to it.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> The basic problem is that a linear increase in bandwidth for the customer
> results in an exponential increase in costs for the ISP

> N * (N - 1) =~ N^2 (assuming full duplex links, which would be generally
> correct for the internet)

1) N^2 is not exponential, it's polynomial.

2) Expanding capacity isn't even N^2, it's just linear.

If you double each residential customer's bandwidth, you "only" have to double
the capacity of your uplinks to other networks. The number of endpoints or
total nodes in the network is entirely irrelevant, because you have the same
50Mbps whether you're drawing it from one AWS server or a thousand BitTorrent
peers. The only way you would get the result you're assuming is if every
endpoint had a fully meshed connection to every other endpoint, i.e. each
customer gets 50Mbps to each Amazon server, a separate 50Mbps to each Google
server and a separate 50Mbps to every single other user on the internet, for a
total of several hundred billion Mbps for every customer. That's not how it
works.

And in practice it's even less expensive. It's sub-linear. Because just giving
everybody a connection which is twice as fast doesn't mean _everybody_ is
going to immediately double their usage. A large fraction of users, given a
faster connection, will do with it only what they currently do with the slower
connection. Their pages will load faster but they won't load more pages, so
the load they put on uplinks to other networks will remain the same.

There are no exponentially increasing costs. There are only the same costs as
there ever were: Cisco et al come out with a new router that puts twice as
many bits through the same piece of cable and if you want those bits you pay
them a fixed cost and swap out your old model for the new one, and in another
few years you do it again.

~~~
eli
> Because just giving everybody a connection which is twice as fast doesn't
> mean everybody is going to immediately double their usage.

My understanding is that peak load is the issue, not total data transferred in
a month. If Netflix downloads/buffers video content as fast as it can, and
people mostly use Netflix at the same time of day, then giving them more
bandwidth is a potentially big problem

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Peak load _is_ what you have to design capacity for, but that is hardly unique
to Netflix. They seem to have it sorted for FiOS/U-verse/etc, don't they?

The argument they might make is that their services keep the data closer to
the users, but that's such a cop out. They could do the same thing for Netflix
with transparent proxies if they wanted to (but the result would be to make
Netflix more usable instead of less, which is adverse to their interests as
competitors). And in any event the uplink to a large peer is a totally
inconsequential part of the cost of operating a network. The thing which is
expensive is upgrading the last mile to handle a large amount of video
traffic, but that cost is the same whether the traffic is Netflix or FiOS TV.

~~~
sologoub
It sounds like what we need is the equivalent of local loop unbundling for
internet services: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-
loop_unbundling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling)

In the UK, I believe the main practice revolves around broadband, whereas in
US it's all around phone (VoIP or otherwise). If you could enable competition
within the same last mile service, you'd a)give a definite incentive to make
sure the entire network delivers the best experience and b)have alternate
sources of revenue to maintain the last mile network.

The current duopoly that exists SoCal in most areas (1 cable provider and 1
DSL provider) is a really terrible consumer experience. For those who have
access to FiOS, it's a tad better, but not by much.

If you had access to 10 providers at once with comparable services, there
would be real incentive for them to offer the best possible experience and
lowest possible prices to consumers... but of course that would hurt corporate
profits and so on and no politician getting those donations wants that...

~~~
AnthonyMouse
What we really need is the equivalent of Glass-Steagall for internet services.
Prohibit the company that operates the last mile from owning or being owned by
anybody that offers end-to-end connectivity or over the top services to end
users.

The problem with just local loop unbundling is that the last mile provider has
the incentive to favor their own services. They can operate their own ISP
division at a loss or with zero margins (more than made up for by profits in
the last mile division) which disadvantages competitors who have to lease the
last mile and thereby maintains the status quo of no competition.

------
jstalin
I have experienced exactly this on Comcast. Suddenly, about two months ago,
Netflix and Hulu became terrible to watch. I thought maybe it was my cable
modem, so I upgraded it and still no luck. So I signed up for a VPN service
and tested watching Netflix and Hulu both on the VPN and off.

Sure enough, when on the VPN, I get the highest quality picture. When I
disconnected the VPN, Netflix dropped down to about 500kbps. Terrible.

~~~
nathan_long
An excellent test. If a VPN makes something faster, despite the fact that it
__adds overhead to the process __, that seems like proof that it 's being
throttled.

~~~
twoodfin
Not necessarily. It might just be bypassing the congested route that everyone
else on your ISP is using. Comcast and Verizon have had disagreements peering
with Cogent, one of Netflix's ISPs:

[http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-
about...](http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about-
netflix-is-cogents-fault/)

It's not throttling, but rather the peering points along the "best" route
between Cogent and Comcast/Verizon are overloaded, resulting in lousy
connections between them. Look at this traceroute hop from Comcast to Cogent I
just recorded:

    
    
       7  he-0-10-0-1-pe03.111eighthave.ny.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.83.94)  21.377 ms  20.379 ms  19.387 ms
       8  be7922.ccr21.jfk10.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.13.161)  67.126 ms  67.747 ms  69.083 ms
    

40 ms to go one short hop in, I believe, the same data center.

~~~
stox
Disagreements with Cogent? Well, I never....

~~~
jmccree
I feel it's unfortunate there's likely a lot of people newer to or unfamiliar
with the bandwidth market that will not fully grok this comment.

------
geofflane
Net Neutrality is fine. The FCC just needs to reclassify internet providers as
common carriers rather than information services.

To quote from the Washington Post [1]: "Broadband is currently classified by
the FCC as an information service, a category that gives the agency a fairly
limited set of regulatory options. If Internet providers were classified
instead as common carriers, the FCC's rule would likely stand. In fact, the
federal ruling on Tuesday upheld the FCC's net neutrality rules as a matter of
principle; the problem is that the agency effectively tried to apply its
powers in the wrong context."

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/01/14...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/01/14/d-c-circuit-court-strikes-down-net-neutrality-rules/)

~~~
wiremine
So what does the legal roadmap look like going forward for the FCC?

------
ef4
I think the ISPs are going to eventually regret this. Once you get a
reputation for having a crappy product, it's hard to lose it. And they _will_
get that reputation.

Their own advertising has often touted how well their service can stream
Netflix. People are already primed to judge them on it, because _the industy
's own advertising has taught them to_.

Stupid stupid.

~~~
zaraflan
Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/et al already have terrible reputations. They also have
dominant local monopolies and the legislative power to defend them.

~~~
nhangen
I disagree. Here in Florida, Verizon FIOS has an excellent reputation and the
product is far superior to the other choices we have.

It's also the first place I've lived where I have choice (Brighthouse being
the other player).

Time Warner and Comcast are definitely among the worst though, and I suspect
that if the OP is correct, it won't be long until Verizon joins them.

~~~
falcolas
Verizon FIOS is exactly the product the article was complaining about...

> I realized that the one thing in common between me and our president was
> that we both had FiOS internet service from Verizon.

~~~
nhangen
Yes, but the reputation isn't going to deteriorate overnight. There's a reason
why they both had it. It's a good product (or it was).

------
spinlock
This is why I think streaming is a broken model: it spikes usage at the same
time every day. BitTorrent (or just off-line downloading) is so much better
because you can amortize the download over the whole day and take advantage of
off-peak bandwidth. We just need to convince copyright holders that its in
their best interest to deliver a superior product.

~~~
aroch
Except streaming is the only viable option due to how content licensing works.
You could do slow (200Kbps) download of content you plan on watching in the
evening while you're at work, but because of restrictive licensing the cost
becomes prohibitive ($10-40/night to rent and watch the same thing as on
Netflix)

~~~
shinratdr
That sounds like a problem for content licensing, not me. Promoting a broken
model because the model that model is built on is broken as well hardly bodes
well for this burgeoning industry.

------
dangrossman
I just spun up an EC2 instance (US-East) and threw a bunch of 100MB-1GB test
files on it.

I'm on Verizon FiOS here at home, residential service, and they all downloaded
at ~20Mb/s, which is the line speed I'm paying for.

Anecdotally, I watch Netflix every night and haven't noticed a
buffering/quality issue. I'll have to try the download test again later.

~~~
ceterumnet
Just FYI - I'm only seeing the slowdowns in the evening.

~~~
couradical
Do you know how many homes in your neighborhood have FiOS? I am wondering if
it's a congestion issue - have you checked RTT in the day vs afternoon? What
about looking at wireshark to see how many duplicate Acks/Re-transmits you're
seeing?

As only the first-hop device appears to be different in the tracert, I doubt
it's something upstream - if they were throttling, they'd probably do it at
the network core - before it left the Verizon network for transit, which would
apply to both circuits.

~~~
bsdetector
I'm on Verizon FIOS and since some time after the ruling Netflix has been
taking 10+ seconds to buffer initial SD quality where before it was always
less than a second. There are times where it takes 15 or 30 minutes to switch
to HD and sometimes it never even does.

Meanwhile I can download games from Steam at 3+ MB/s, torrent at the same
rate, and so on.

Maybe Netflix suddenly got a ton of demand shortly after the net neutrality
ruling or changed their software, but frankly Verizon doesn't get the benefit
of the doubt. They've done so many sketchy things that at this point if they
aren't doing this on purpose they need to prove it.

------
o0-0o
I think Time Warner has started doing this now as well. Right after the
ruling, Netflix quality was so poor that I bought a new modem. No improvement.
I will have to check the other AWS services I use including my own stiff.
Thanks for posting.

~~~
leobelle
There is a lot of complexity involved with network connections. There are many
plausible alternative explanations for your and the author's problems. One or
two people talking about their experience isn't the kind of data you would
need to jump to the conclusion that your ISP is throttling your internet
connection.

~~~
Justsignedup
They literally stated that during a support call "we throttle cloud services"

Can anyone set up a "speed test" online on AWS or something similar? This way
we can experiment with connections.

~~~
insaneirish
Unless they were told to specifically say what they did, which seems unlikely,
the chance of a first level technical support person having any clue what sort
of QoS policy is implemented on the network is basically zero.

That sort of person would not have access to see such things directly and
wouldn't have the skill set to interpret configuration.

------
MichaelTieso
Not sure the person in the chat understood the question. Doesn't appear to be
a native English speaker.

~~~
squigs25
Totally true, but let's be honest even if the chat representative understood
English perfectly and denied up and down that Verizon was throttling, he
probably doesn't have the expertise to know one way or the other what is
actually happening.

I think the evidence speaks for itself however.

------
joshuacc
I have also noticed a similar effect on Verizon FIOS, where some video
services work perfectly well during the day, but around 5pm or so start
getting incredibly slow to buffer. Whether this is intentional throttling I'm
not qualified to say, but it makes me quite hesitant to use Verizon in the
future.

~~~
brown9-2
I've noticed this when streaming from the PBS Apple TV app, but not so much
the Netflix app or website.

Occum's razor would suggest the problem is likely with the video services
themselves, and/or congestion from other people who are now home from work
watching videos, than something malicious from Verizon.

------
bartkappenburg
Slightly off topic:

I'm very lucky to live in the Netherlands if I compare the average speeds,
even with the mediocre ISPs, with the rest of the countries where Netflix is
active.

See:
[http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/netherlands](http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/netherlands)

~~~
gst
You can't really compare a small densely populated country such as the
Netherlands to a huge country with large rural areas such as the United
States. If you live in an urban area here (such as the Bay Area) you get
excellent speeds as well.

~~~
seanmcq
What bay area do you live in and who is your ISP?

------
bhouston
Someone should write a speed test website that looks to read from a set of
common cloud services and then compares the speeds and records this based on
ISP and location.

This shouldn't be hard to setup and you'll get a ton of page views probably
for ever.

One can then see degradations over time and based on ISP. Would be even nicer
to have some controls in there too so you can see if well known cloud services
are slower than non-cloud services.

~~~
trigger
Netflix already do this,
[http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/](http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/)

~~~
JangoSteve
I'm a little confused by the average speed reported in their speed index. Not
sure about the others, but I know Comcast and AT&T both offer several speed
tiers. Is their average speed reported here affected by the percentage of
customers who purchase the lowest tier?

~~~
wmf
Yes, which is why the data is effectively impossible to interpret. Only the
FCC reports speed as a percentage of the plan. [http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-
broadband-america](http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america)

------
ceterumnet
I've updated the blog post to also include traceroutes from the 2 sites. I'm
not a networking expert, but since the traffic is ultimately going through the
same network - peering should be a non issue. Feel free to let me know if this
is significant or not.

~~~
rnovak
There are really too many variables to have any idea. For example, in both
instances I see that your traceroute identifies the hop to your router, and
you're using the 192.168.1.0 private network. Since your business example
shows actual reverse dns lookups (from the looks of it), I'm guessing it uses
a commercial switch.

Unfortunately, there's no way to determine the actual cause of the slow down.

For instance, you said that the slow down happens after 5pm, which quite
literally is when 80+% of the working force gets off work. It could also be an
artifact of AWS, and not Verizon FIOS.

Also, 2 instances does not a trend make. There's no way to know if you're one
of those people who were sent a letter because they were using terabytes of
data a month, and they're simply protecting the network traffic of 99% of
their other users. Granted, I assume you aren't, but I can't be 100% sure.

For a truly independent test, you'd need the same modem/access device, without
a local switch (i.e. a machine connected directly to the modem), and you would
need VPN access to test both identifiable and non-identifiable traffic.

If you could verify that Netflix traffic through the VPN, on the same network,
without any interference through the router, was delivering much more
bandwidth than the same Netflix traffic, but in the open (not through the
VPN), and could do so for a statistically significant portion of the Verizon
FIOS user base, then you'd have reason to complain. Until then, I don't see
your claim being taken very seriously.

Just my opinion though, ymmv

~~~
Touche
> Unfortunately, there's no way to determine the actual cause of the slow
> down.

Is networking the most frustratingly complex field in technology? As someone
who admittedly knows little about it it all seems like a pile of hacks stacked
on top of one another. It's the only explanation I can come up for why it's
near impossible to figure out why a network isn't behaving correctly.

------
brianmcdonough
The net neutrality issue is a tragedy of the commons. Say you have a common
green area and everyone shares it. People come and picnic and everything's
great until a family of giants moves into town and sits on the entire green.

Netflix is like that family of giants.

The solution is to build a bigger green, but how is that going to be funded.
Customers don't want to pay for it and feel they're already being overcharged.
Netflix doesn't want to pay for it just because they are streaming giant
files. Such costs are not built into their ability to make profits.

It's a common tragedy.

~~~
talmand
Your analogy seems off to me. It works as long as you admit that the reason
the family of giants is there because everyone else wants them to be there.

Plus, both the customers and Netflix already pay into the system, it's just
that the companies in charge of it want more simply because Netflix is a
competitor to some of the services they offer.

~~~
Zizzle
Exactly.

It's not like the ISPs and making a profit. They are extremely profitable and
just want more.

Makes me wonder how much this discussion is being atrsoturfed.

------
xSwag
Yes let's arm ourselves with pitchforks based on an anecdotal experience of a
stranger on the internet.

~~~
eksith
"That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this." Should be
easy enough for someone else to verify shortly.

No need for pitchforks, but corroboration would certainly be welcome.

------
wheaties
So there's no issue with a business line? Sounds like they're NOT throttling
Netflix per se but rather residential lines. That would make sense since
businesses pay more and generally consume less.

Welcome to the future.

------
vzwthrow
Throwaway here, so take it for what it's worth but I swear my experiences are
true.

I deal with Verizon _Wireless_ (as far as I can tell, the article is about the
other Verizon entity) reps often, I've heard this mentioned many times in an
almost off-handed, positive, revenue-generating manner.

That they're positioning themselves to charge providers like Netflix for
"priority" on their network. Except the way they describe it, it sounds like
they will be deprioritizing or otherwise "shitifying", for lack of a better
word, the provider's traffic. Netflix was specifically mentioned.

It's never mentioned on internal slides, but there's always some vague term on
a slide that brings up this topic.

This is going to happen, people, unless legislation interferes with their plan
and even then they may be able to loophole it. Net neutrality is the enemy, as
far as Verizon (and possibly the other big telcos) are concerned.

~~~
talmand
I see it more as an opportunity for more VPN services. I can imagine the ads
proclaiming something along the lines of getting the bandwidth you're already
paying for.

~~~
chwahoo
Those VPN services better pony up to Verizon then. ;)

~~~
talmand
Yeah, I suppose that's true.

Maybe there's something in the transition to IPv6 that might help with this?
But then I guess they could do the opposite and throttle everything but what's
on their ransom list.

------
eksith
Oh dear. Looks like the work left for Google Fiber isn't done yet. Hoping
they'll make a run in New York (or at least upstate where I intend to move),
but that's a long shot.

I wonder how much independent ISPs could make if they stick to a small list of
customers, but take up the "We Don't Throttle" stance.

~~~
lucb1e
Google Fiber is the worst idea ever. You know this company makes the vast
majority of its income through advertising and collecting data about you,
right?

I understand that it's a great service for a great price, but the question is
how long that remains sustainable. Right now they're sitting on such a pile of
money that it doesn't matter whether they provide internet access in a few
cities at a super cheap price. They benefit enough in reputation and in extra
usage of other services when people are able to use very high quality
internet.

Proof of this is that Google disallowed running servers (the very thing that
makes the internet the internet, end to end communication) up until their
reputation was almost completely tarnished in the hacker community. Only then
did they relent and allow servers to be run. They're not much different from
other for-profit companies.

~~~
Fogest
They would be stupid to allow servers. Buy your own business line if you want
that. Google doesn't want others losing bandwidth because some people want to
run servers.

~~~
lucb1e
There is a reason the internet was designed with end to end connectivity in
mind. If my ISP randomly start filtering packets, like AWS traffic or incoming
TCP SYN packets, net neutrality is broken and I _will_ break the contract with
that ISP right away. Contract or not, they won't get another penny.

It's a different matter if I consume 5TB of data per month and it's costing
them a lot of money on bandwidth to upstream providers. But filtering servers
altogether is plain old evil. It doesn't cost them anything and they don't
have to decide what's right for me.

~~~
Fogest
I don't think Google looks for traffic originating from a server specifically.
I doubt it is really even possible as it would look just like traffic from a
normal computer.

------
Twirrim
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained
by stupidity."

It could be any number of things, like a problem with one of their peering
providers. I wouldn't take one customer support agent's word for it.

------
alimoeeny
OK, this guy lost his job, I am sure they record all the conversations, and
just a grep -i "cloud providers" should be enough to find the conversation,
sorry man,

------
jusben1369
I'm not sure I believe any of this for reasons others have pointed out. But
let's say it's true. Is this an argument for or against Net Neutrality?

By most accounts I read NetFlix is responsible for 30% + of evening internet
traffic. Kind of staggering. If an ISP actively throttled Netflix _people
would leave that ISP for another one that didn 't throttle Netflix_ Netflix is
clearly a hugely popular service with enough people that it could exercise
that clout. Netflix can sign agreements and tout such providers (heck, bundle
in sign up offers etc) So the market can solve this problem.

Secondly, why are they throttling this service? Because they can't charge
effectively for it. We all love the simplicity of "all you can eat" pricing.
Yet Netflix essentially exploited that model to their own benefit to the point
now that model is under risk.

I find it fascinating that a service that has (legally and ethically and
followed standard biz practices and sensibilities) grown to gobble 30% of all
resources and effectively _squeezes out other traffic_ is seen as a victim
here. I'm not trolling so would love to hear what I'm missing.

~~~
edent
Well, there are two problems with that scenario.

1) There may not be other services in the area - or all services throttle.
Your only solution is to move house.

2) The user may not realise it is their ISP which is the problem. "NetFlix
sucks - it's so slow. But TimeWarnerCastPlayer is awesome - it's so fast!"

NetFlix isn't "squeezing" anyone. Customers are requesting data through their
ISP, NetFlix are sending it as asked.

~~~
jusben1369
Netflix has an ISP tracker on their site that shows performance by ISP. Trust
me, if they _know_ your ISP is a "throttler" they have the ways to get this in
front of you and highlight "Hey you're having a crappy experience because
you're using X and they throttle us. Y wants your business and will give you a
$150 coupon to change. Click here now"

~~~
pikachu_is_cool
I had no idea someone could be this naive. WE'RE AT THE MERCY OF AN OLIGOPOLY.
THEY HAVE MEETINGS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS TO COLLECTIVELY RAISE THEIR PRICES AND
PROVIDE MINIMUM SERVICE. THEY CAN FUCK US AS MUCH AS THEY WANT, AND WE CAN'T
DO SHIT BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ANY COMPETITION. THERE ISN'T ANY COMPETITION
BECAUSE THE BARRIER TO ENTRY FOR A NEW ISP IS SO HIGH THAT IT IS LITERALLY
IMPOSSIBLE; EXCEPT FOR COMPANIES WITH THE RESOURCES COMPARABLE TO GOOGLE. ONLY
FUCKING GOOGLE.

Jesus Christ. I can't believe you are savvy enough to pay for your own
internet service and you don't realize this.

~~~
jusben1369
oh my all caps on HN. I guess there really is no where safe on the Internet.

~~~
pikachu_is_cool
Sorry, man.

------
tim333
Verizon denies it to the Washington post:

"We treat all traffic equally, and that has not changed," the statement read.
"Many factors can affect the speed of a customer’s experience for a specific
site, including that site’s servers, the way the traffic is routed over the
Internet and other considerations. We are looking into this specific matter,
but the company representative was mistaken. We’re going to redouble our
representative education efforts on this topic."

Although in the comments there's a guy who differs:

"Chris Walsh wrote: Verizon is absolutely doing this, at least in Silver
Spring. I stumbled on the daveblog's post via a facebook friend and was amazed
because if finally explains what has happened to my home FIOS connection over
the last few weeks, even down to the exact 40 kbps speed. ..."

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/02/05...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/02/05/verizon-denies-using-net-neutrality-victory-to-sabotage-
netflix-amazon/)

------
brown9-2
Let's say Verizon was intentionally throttling all traffic to AWS at certain
times of the day (which seems like an awfully blunt weapon, but whatever).

Where is the part of this where they are promoting their video services over
Netflix's "inferior" experience?

~~~
saskiah
They don't have to explicitly promote this.

Honestly, getting people fed up with Netflix (not realizing that Verizon is at
fault) and then deciding to go with an actually TV package (with a discount
for bundling it with internet, no less) might be the goal here.

That, or the goal is simply to hurt Netflix, which approaches the same end
from the side of the provider, not the consumer.

------
j_m_b
To the people saying that you shouldn't trust some tech support guy, I counter
with this: He is acting as representative on behalf of Verizon. Verizon
trained them and Verizon gave them the scripts to read so that this tech will
properly represent Verizon.

------
cobookman
The industry as a whole will eventually just charge a per GB cost. During peak
hours its more expensive...etc, just like electricity. The interesting part
will be if they still have speed tiers. Its really in both parties best
interest.

~~~
ChrisLTD
I'm guessing there will be speed tiers at first. The telecom industry doesn't
leave money on the table without pressure from the government or fierce
competition.

~~~
wmf
Speed tiers at first? Pretty much all Internet connections today are sold by
speed already.

~~~
ChrisLTD
The parent question was asking whether or not speed tiers would go away if
they charged for data by the GB. I'm saying they wont go away, at least not
immediately.

------
specialp
Verizon may not purposely throttle content but they are certainly
uncooperative because they want to be paid from the big bandwidth consumers.
This is why Google is trying to make it more transparent to users who is to
fault when you can barely watch YouTube in 360P on FIOS during some periods
when speed tests to other locations yield 50Mbit.
[http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#how_video_gets...](http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/#how_video_gets_to_you)

------
jpswade
Net Neutrality was dead as soon as Google became an ISP.

We all know where this is going.

------
veritas20
File a compliant with the FCC. Yes, I know, but you have to start somewhere to
let them know how their action/inaction/decisions affect consumers. The more
complaints, the better.

------
transfire
Can anyone else verify this or similar?

------
saskiah
Has anyone else tried duplicating some simple tests?

Ping google and netflix while connected to a verizon network. Repeat on a
network with a different provider, see if the speeds are proportional, or if
there is a larger % decrease for netflix than for google when on the verizon
network.

I know this doesn't explicitly prove anything, but if several people all get
this result that starts to compile more evidence.

------
grej
This is probably only the beginning. On demand video directly threatens the
television business model of these companies. They will use every technology
available to them to throttle users like crazy until they are compelled not
to, either by the market (consumers en masse) or by regulation.

------
danielsiders
We're seing up to 80% packet loss on our routes to Cogent (Verizon FiOS
customers).

------
smutticus
We need more data. This doesn't prove anything and the author is just
speculating.

------
inkovic
If companies are serious in battling ISP throttling, they should explain to
users that their content will load slowly due to their ISP and they should
consider switching.

Make Verizon and whatnot pay with their wallets.

------
polarix
Back to torrents, anyone?

------
higherpurpose
Solution: don't serve Netflix to Verizon customers.

------
broknbottle
The traceroute is useless without a return traceroute..

------
nevir
This looks more like an overloaded residential gateway.

~~~
jonknee
Overloaded just to AWS? Seems strange.

------
jevinskie
Does Netflix actually stream video data from AWS or from other CDNs? Can the
OP compare the route to AWS to the route to the Netflix server?

~~~
kevingadd
IIRC netflix runs pretty much everything out of AWS.

------
GunlogAlm
Net Neutrality is dead [in the United States].

------
squigs25
I think the best way to test this would be to open a VPN connection, and
connect to AWS or watch Netflix via VPN

------
fredgrott
I like to point out something...

The ISP providers that use fixed wireless to customers have the same upstream
infrastructure and costs as Verizon..

Want to guess if they are throttling?

They are not.. for example CSINEt local to me does not

So we should be asking what part of verzion's structure is forcing them to do
this..

It cannot be money alone as both entities are entitled to the same broadband
federal grants

------
darkarmani
This might explain why netflix has been working horribly starting about a
month ago.

------
alimoeeny
So that is what's going on! What should we do?

------
rmchugh
might have been a good idea to black out his name. poor fellow might lose his
job for being caught saying that.

~~~
lucb1e
I'm pretty sure the chats get logged, they can search through that. There are
no privacy regulations in the US like there are in Europe about not spying on
employees, and even here (Europe) most have an automated message saying "This
[chat/call] may be recorded for training purposes."

------
elgato999
Switch to t-mobile. Screw verizon

~~~
PanMan
AFAIK Netflix doesn't stream directly from AWS, but (while using it for their
transcoding and so) uses a CDN. So blocking AWS wouldn't help in changing the
quality of netflix, right? It certainly could be related though.

~~~
vzwthrow
They use a form of deep packet inspection to identify and "manage" traffic on
their network. Where it sits doesn't matter.

