Level 3 has accused Comcast of demanding fees to transfer data from Level 3’s backbone to Comcast customers. Level 3 describes this as “Internet online movies and other content,” which would mean everything, even though it’s calling out movies. Level 3 signed a deal on November 11th to act as one of Netflix’s primary network providers. In October, Internet monitoring service Sandvine said Netflix streaming represents 20 percent of all U.S. Internet non-mobile bandwidth use during prime-time hours. Far be it from me to defend Comcast’s policies, even while I am generally happy with its service. I subscribe to Comcast cable broadband service at home and at work, and it performs quite well in my parts of Seattle. I don’t have much choice–Qwest has limited availability of an “up to 20 Mbps” service–so I’m lucky cable performs. And Comcast caps my 15 to 25 Mbps downstream service to 250 GB per month, with no-appeal threats of cutoff after two broken caps in a year. Nonetheless, this may not be quite what it seems. The Internet is a syndicate of different networks that agree to interconnect on various terms. There are quasi-public meet-me network rooms in which providers all pay to connect in and traffic passes among all those present. Networks can also choose to create peering points between each other when traffic demands it.

My understanding of fee-free peering, however, is
that the data transferred must be roughly equivalent, whether
in a private peering arrangement or one conducted in meet-me
rooms. If the traffic becomes highly asymmetric, the party
doing the heavy lifting may complain, because it’s bearing the
cost of carrying another network’s traffic, even though that
may be what its users are demanding. It’s possible that Level 3
is feeding such an enormous amount of data to Comcast in return
for receiving relatively little that Comcast wants to leverage
this into Level 3 paying for access to its network. If that
turns out to be the complaint, it’s problematic. Network
neutrality argues for treating all network traffic from any
source the same: no throttling, no filtering, no blocking.
Exceptions may be made when a network’s performance degrades
because of incoming traffic, but that’s an infrastructure issue
rather than precisely a political one. Comcast might be taking
the tack of complaining about an unequal peering relationship
that Level 3’s customers should be paying for without
highlighting differentiated traffic. That’s harder to defend
against, because that would require the FCC stating that
network and Internet providers cannot establish peering
relationships on terms that they choose. In effect, Comcast
could filter without basing it on packets. Comcast hasn’t
responded at this writing, and I’m curious to see its
explanation and the FCC’s response. Update:
Comcast told
the Washington Post: “This has nothing to do with
Level 3’s desire to distribute different types of network
traffic. Comcast has long established and mutually acceptable
commercial arrangements with Level 3’s Content Delivery Network
(CDN) competitors in delivering the same types of traffic to
our customers.” Not particularly clear, but “mutually
acceptable commercial arrangements” would seem to indicate
peering contracts. Update 2: Commenters
indicate that a bit of clarification is needed here. I didn’t
properly distinguish between Comcast’s handling of packets that
originate from Level 3 and then pass over any path to reach
Comcast, and Comcast’s direct interchange with Level 3 (which
some commenters argue is not properly called a peering point,
although I disagree). Comcast cannot be denied to have the
business basis to determine with which firms it directly
contracts and to which it opens specific point-to-point
pipelines for network interchange. That may be the issue at
hand. Where network neutrality intrudes is if Comcast is
threatening to degrade or block all Level 3 traffic on any
Internet route to Comcast. While no laws or regulation
specifically prohibit that, that’s a different kettle of fish
than wanting to collect fees for a direct network connection
with Level 3. Photo
by Adrian Sampson used via Creative
Commons.