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This kind of throttling is done to squeeze more money from anything crossing their network. All ISPs want a piece of the pie so they will charge at both ends anything coming in and anything going out to you.

Can customers/subscribers of the ISP sue for damages? I guess the ISP has a pretty defensive ToS though. :(

No because the contract you have with them has no enforceable SLA and you can't really prove any damages.

Almost every large business has a forced arbitration clause now.

That is just how the Internet works. Everyone is selling and buying access to networks. Whether directly or in the form of agreements. And most people are of course trying to get more for less. One could certainly wish that things would be different, but it isn't like they are doing something especially nefarious.

Imagine that you have a delivery service.

You pay your local delivery company $X per month and they promise that they'll deliver you 1 package a day from their local depot.

But it turns out that although you're ordering a package a day from Amazon, you're not receiving a package a day. You get your stuff, but it's delayed and backed-up somewhere.

And so as an experiment you sign up for a service that will receive a package for you, re-box it in their own packaging and then send it on to you. You then start to receive a package a day again.

At that point you start wondering, are they looking at the boxes, seeing they are from Amazon and then just deciding to leave them sitting around their warehouse for a while?

And the answer is yes, even though you're paying for the service, they also want whoever is sending the package to pay them to ensure that they get their package on time.

So while their may well be all sorts of agreements between all the different parcel companies about who will do what when, it's frustrating as an end-user that there's all these weird agreements that impact me. After all I'm paying for packages to be delivered, not 'packages that are offered by our partners'.

Your scenario isn't particularly outlandish. That is how a lot of economy services work. And also why you can usually get other deliveries while many other packages, e.g. from China, are waiting to be processed. Not that deliveries are much like the Internet.

That’s just not how the Internet works and it’s never how it worked. This old article from Cisco (based on a 1999 book) explains that there can be various kind of business arrangements in an interconnected network: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/press/internet-protocol-.... The article likens the situation to airlines, where multiple transit providers might be involved and where there may be complex fee sharing arrangements between all the providers.

Note that this book predated the rise of streaming video providers by more than a decade. Back then, nobody thought that delivery of content over the Internet was this simple one-sided transaction. It’s a new view of the Internet that has arisen because it suits the interests of these very lucrative streaming businesses.

I was only trying to make the point that from the point of the view of the average consumer it's hard to know what it is that you're agreeing to pay for and what you're going to get. I understand the complexities involved.

You're sold a "XXXMb/s connection to 'the internet'", which people take to mean "XXXMb/s of the thing that I want, whatever that is" and not "XXXMb/s connection to the edge of the network, and then you get what you get given."

It's still the responsibility of the ISP to deliver connectivity to other hosts on the internet at their promised speed, regardless what is necessary to do so or how it operates internally. That's the service that they are advertising to the consumer.

If UPS decided to change the way they internally route their packages, it doesn't mean that they can just brush off promised delivery dates because "it doesn't work how you think it does." I think that's the point the OP was making.

It just doesn't make any sense. It is like saying that UPS should deliver to everywhere on earth in one day for the same price, despite large differences in cost between local delivery and e.g. air freight to a war zone.

The Internet is a bunch of interconnected networks. Any of those networks can largely have whatever conditions they want. That is what the Internet is. Do I think it should be different, yes, but a lot of people don't. Especially those arguing against things like throttling.

> It is like saying that UPS should deliver to everywhere on earth in one day for the same price

No, it's not like that at all. UPS makes it clear to the customer in advance what the cost is, how long it will take, and the customer agrees. Also, UPS is not held responsible for delays that they couldn't reasonably prevent (bad weather, etc).

It's also an exaggeration of the situation; it's essentially saying "If we can't achieve perfection, then we might as well not have any standards and we can't hold anyone accountable for anything." The fact is that those speeds are obtainable in most of the common situations that people actually need them, and the throttling only occurs out of unwillingness on the part of ISPs to negotiate agreements that would allow those speeds; it's greed and/or laziness, not physical or technical limitations.

You can have whatever opinion you want on what the Internet should be, just like I can. But the Internet today is different networks settings their own policy. Google can say "connect to us and we won't charge you for YouTube traffic", but that doesn't stop someone else from saying "no, pay us for access to our networks instead". It doesn't really matter if something is available or not as such because the whole model is based on exchanging access to infrastructure.

At the end of the day what you are describing is some sort of regulated nationalized Internet backbone. Which would to a larger extent support such features. As it is now if you don't like the "mix" of access you are getting, you should change providers (which could of course be a problem, but that is another issue).

It doesn’t have to be nationalized, it could alternatively be honestly priced and advertised. Most other businesses work this way: Starbucks doesn’t say “sorry, we only can give you half the coffee you paid for because our suppliers want more money and it would cut into our profits.” Instead, they work behind the scenes to make sure they can serve their product as advertised, and raise the price if necessary. I don’t know why you think the internet is any different; it’s a set of negotiations like any other business.

Internet "access" is, and always has been, a link to an "access network." ISPs promise that that they'll route packets from that access network to the Internet, but nobody promises you end-to-end connectivity at a particular speed (unless you pay for a dedicated line). (Verizon, for example, caveats it's product as being a "gigabit connection to your home.")

People like to pretend like internet access service is a promise to get your packets from point A to point B anywhere on the internet at a given speed. That is based on the fiction indulged by the software folks, who just think about getting bytes between a pair of sockets and don’t care how the internet actually works. But as explained in that Cisco article, interconnection and transit has always been distinct from access, and has been the subject of separate commercial negotiations between network operators. That reflects the technical reality that the internet is not a single network, but an agglomeration of private access and transit networks. The idealized software abstraction of the internet doesn’t define what it actually is. If you read the contract that defines what you're buying, it's not promising you that idealized abstraction.

So, really, they're lying when they say things like:

> Indulge in super speed and have a great online experience, whether you're browsing the Web, shopping, or streaming your favorite movies and shows.

Because if all I am paying for is access (to Xfinity's servers), then they cannot in any way guaranteed even being able to get to a simple blog.

They're marketing copy needs to be looked at.

This is disingenuous. Yes, an ISP can’t do anything if you pay for 1Gbps but can’t download that fast from a server in Turkey. But the only reason a customer can’t get sufficient bandwidth from Netflix, whose servers are often 5 hops away in the same city, is because the ISP is not doing their job. Being an ISP implies also doing a proper job of setting up agreements such that the bandwidth you pay for is usable.

You’re backing off from your original assertion:

> It's still the responsibility of the ISP to deliver connectivity to other hosts on the internet at their promised speed, regardless what is necessary to do so or how it operates internally

So they don’t have to deliver 1 gbps to every end point, they just need to “do a proper job” to make the bandwidth “usable.” But what does “proper job” mean? Historically, it has meant making reasonable efforts to reach interconnection agreements with other network operators. It has not meant that you’re required to upgrade your peering so that 50%+ of all your traffic can come from a single peer, at no cost to the other peer.

I’m not backing off my argument; I’m arguing from a stance of reasonableness rather than perfection. And while we can argue on exactly what defines “reasonableness”, I think it’s unambiguously clear that a large number of people do in fact need 50% of their traffic to come from a single peer and I think it shouldn’t be unreasonable to expect an ISPs to address that rather than throttling customers. I know plenty of people whose internet usage consists of email, Facebook and hours upon hours of streaming Netflix.

It may not be how it works, but that's how it was presented to us.

That's not how Internet works. At all. Please stop spreading this misinformation.

Your post totally ignores peering agreements and interconnects that are key to understanding this issue.

Peering agreements and interconnects are the ISP's problem, not the customers'.

Right... until you grandma can’t Skype with you because Microsoft didn’t pay the “decongestion” tax to that neighborhood IP she’s using or every ISP along the way.

Or when the firefighters get throttled because their unlimited data is consumed and your house goes up in smoke.

I really hope firefighters and other emergency services don't depend on the unreliable mobile network. Those will be some of the first things to go down in case of an actual emergency, along with the power grid.

Most fires that require an emergency response are not at the scale that could possibly impact cellular serivce. Even a whole neighbourhood going up in smoke isn't going to take down cell towers unless that tower happens to actually be in the middle of that neighbourhood.

They rely on it because there's no real good alternative for data. Europe uses TETRA [0] (the equivalent of the North American P25 but with better data support among other things) for critical communications but still needs a TETRA + 3G/LTE hybrid for large data transfers (above the hundreds of Kbps order speeds TETRA offers).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...

I really want the ISPs to define exactly what my monthly fees are paying for.

They'll clearly tell you that faster is better:

> Indulge in super speed and have a great online experience, whether you're browsing the Web, shopping, or streaming your favorite movies and shows.

But I want to know what my money is actually paying for.

Throttling is generally defined as purposefully slowing some (or all) traffic, in the absence of network congestion.

That you may have a faster connection to one provider than another doesn't indicate throttling, unless you can show that the network paths are essentially the same and the slower provider isn't the one restricting the data rate.

Certainly, almost any last mile congestion should affect all providers; but most content providers are going try to deliver content from as close to the user as possible; either through CDN boxes deployed inside ISPs networks if possible, or at a nearby place where the ISP or its transit partners peer. I'm aware that Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon all run their own CDN programs, so it's very likely that they're interconnecting to the ISP on separate connections, and without insider knowledge from the ISPs or the CDNs, it's impossible to know what the congestion looks like there. CDN installations also have capacity limitations, and take time to upgrade. It's not unreasonable to assume that some content providers are running their networks hotter than others.

In the years since the Internet has become mainstream, people seem to have forgotten the bad old days of downloading a large file, and trying to figure out which mirror would serve the file the fastest; which usually meant figuring out which mirror was both physically close, and well connected to the downloader's network.

"The article is not about congestion control but rather marketing choices where one streaming service is favored over the other within the captured market of an ISP customers."

I wonder if that's true, or this is simply a result of the peering agreements that content providers have engaged in since forever.

For those who don't know: if Netflix is colocated in the same datacenter(s) as CSPire, it's possible to "throw an ethernet cable over the cage wall" and make a direct connection to CSPire. This results in dramatically better bandwidth and latency, but requires significant up-front costs (it's also not possible for every provider to peer with every distributor, for logistical reasons).

As much as I believe in the concept of net neutrality, I feel like the conversation misses many of the technical nuances of the way the internet actually works. Peering is one example: you can have an entirely "neutral" internet, but still observe dramatic differences between one provider and another, based on your network location.

(Edit: now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic. Which is a different discussion.)

Could there be other causes than differentiation to explain the data collect? That would be an excellent questioning to ask the team at University of Massachusetts if they made a dissertation or research paper, since all the article says is that they used a established peer-reviewed technique that assumingly has gone through such questioning. It would be interesting to know the statistical probability that collocated servers would exclusively explain the data.

> now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic.

I must strongly disagree there. What kind of different class of traffic would give throttled traffic to different forms of on-demand video stream services? NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime. I don't see it so please name the four different classes of traffic those sites represent that a congestion system would use as identifiers.

"I must strongly disagree there."

The article makes it clear what they did, and what conclusions they drew:

"Using a previously established, peer-reviewed technique, the team conducted more than half a million data traffic tests across 161 countries. From this data, the team found that internet service providers are “giving a fixed amount of bandwidth—typically something in the range of one and a half megabits per second to four megabits per second—to video traffic, but they don’t impose these limits on other network traffic.”

Moreover, the data shown directly below that paragraph reveals little pattern in the provider/app throttling rates. The data shows mostly that video is being throttled across the board.

Could there be other explanations for this? Absolutely. Peering is just one of many plausible explanations.

> What kind of different class of traffic would give throttled traffic to different forms of on-demand video stream services? NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime.

There may be a small amount of packet loss at the time due to the ISP shaping their traffic to prevent congestion.

The higher the latency, the more the packet loss will affect the throughput.

The services you mention all use different CDNs, which may all have different latencies at the point of observation:

> NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime

NBCSports - I would guess Akamai, who deploys at IX and ISP Netflix - Usually Openconnect CDN devices at IX or ISP YouTube Premium - Google Global Cache deployed at IX and/or ISP (GCCs are deployed in most consumer ISPs, probably the best-distributed CDN at the moment). Amazon prime - Cloudfront, deployed mainly at IX, I am not sure if they have deployments in ISPs yet.

(I haven't tried to find more information on their approach, but https://dd.meddle.mobi/index.html seems to indicate that CDN issues shouldn't affect the way they measure, but until I do some checking on whether popular DPI platforms would be able to be fooled by this, and without them providing timestamped data, I'll have to test myself against DPI policies I wrote and I hope my ex-colleagues haven't changed too much ...)

Interesting, but isn't it also a potential bottleneck at the other side of the network? I.e.: NBCSport has fatter pipes/less congestion than YouTube?