When we talk about network neutrality, we’re generally concerned about our retail Internet providers serving as gatekeepers to the content that Americans are paying dearly to access. Because your Internet provider is the only pathway to your home, it has a tremendous amount of power to determine the content you can access and on what terms. Indeed, it has a monopoly on the “terminating access line” directly to you because you only subscribe to one home Internet provider at a time. In order for a content or service provider to reach you, they have no choice but to send their data over the network owned by your Internet provider. From a technical perspective, ISPs can manipulate your Internet access in a number of ways. They can block content over the network, so it appears as though certain content or services simply don’t exist; they can throttle your access, deliberately slowing down some content over others; or they can do what happened in the scenario described above—allow prolonged periods of widespread congestion to occur over their networks while they attempt to negotiate interconnection fees from transit and content providers. Ultimately, what the M-Lab research and OTI policy brief confirm is that customers of most of the major U.S. ISPs experienced substantial Internet slowdowns when their traffic passed across the boundary between their Internet service provider and the network hosting popular content and services. Congestion at the interconnections resulted in slow download speeds, dropped IP phone and video calls, and application freezes. These problems were not isolated events. They persisted for at least nine months for the majority of American broadband consumers, and in some cases continue on today.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 03:22:16 +0000
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