This is the root of the problem.
Here in Australia I can choose any number of retail ISPs that will service my Fibre to the Home connection. If I was not living in the building I am now I would be able to choose any number of ADSL ISPs. This creates competition and fixes the problem.
Funnily enough this access is legislated here in Australia. Yes. Legislated.
There can be no ISP monopolies in Australia.
Better yet we have embarked on building a Fibre to the Home national network called the National Broadband Network which functions under the same scheme, ensuring we won't have any bullshit monopolies for the foreseeable future.
Americans should campaign for the same solution, enforce last-mile wholesale and legislate separation of ISP retail from ISP wholesale business units.
Everyone wins.
Tons of markets that have been "deregulated" have become more competitive - national airlines in Europe, Ma Bell in the US - but they are almost all about breaking up a government sponsored/created monopoly. The US market telecom market has done an amazing job re-merging, to the point that a few more mergers and it'll be Ma Bell all over again.
Just feel I should add that while we did embark on building a Fibre to the Home network, after the last election we're switching to a Fibre to the Node network instead.
No. The rich can't get obscenely richer.
I'm no fan of monopolistic ISPs, but it is true that when you have a peering point with unbalanced traffic flows, the side sending more traffic is supposed to pay the side receiving more traffic. You pay per byte sent, just like how the sender of a letter pays postage. This has always been the case, and as long as Verizon charges Level 3 the same amount per-packet as they do any other sender, there's no violation of net neutrality.
So Level 3/Netflix is making the argument that all Verizon has to do is install some additional network cables and everything would be fixed. Well that's a convenient argument, given that Level 3 sends way more traffic than it receives on that link, and currently (it seems) isn't paying for that difference. I hate to say it, but I think Verizon may actually be in the right here, at least insofar as that Level 3 should in fact be paying for that peering arrangement. Level 3's blog post seem deceptive on this point.
That said, Verizon has a video service that competes with Netflix. Verizon's video service presumably doesn't have to pay transit fees to reach Verizon customers. So what's to stop Verizon from charging unreasonable fees in order to stamp out competition? Presumably, this is the real problem: Verizon and Level 3 cannot agree on a price, because Verizon has no reason to offer a reasonable price.
So Level 3 and Netflix are waging a public campaign to shame Verizon, presumably as a bargaining chip to get the price lower. But neither side is really being truthful with us.
I'm just happy that in my area I can get sonic.net, an ISP whose only business interest is delivering packets.
That is true if Level3 was sending traffic through Verizon to say Cogent or HE. But in this case, the OP is requesting this traffic through VZ and he is paying VZ to carry this traffic for him.
That's a very disingenuous way of putting things.
Let's get all the actors in play here:
Netflix - The website/service you're trying to access
Level3 - Netflix's ISP
Version - Your ISP
You
So to get to Netflix you'er going through 2 different entities.
If you consider Level3 and Verizon to be on the same level ( after all, they're both ISPs), then your argument works the same way the other way around : Netflix is paying Level 3 for the connection between it and you, so why shouldn't Level 3 be responsible for this? Why is only Verizon responsible?
The second way of seeing things is that Verizon is responsible for the connection between you and Level3 (i.e. Level3 is a Verizon customer). Level3 wants to just plug in more cables to get better speeds on Verizon.... well who wouldn't expect to have to pay more for that?
In no situation is Level3 entitled to the maximum speed technically available to it for no cost. The counterpart to this is that it's Verizon's responsibility to offer reasonable pricing for upgrades (and not have content discrimination and conflicts of interest).
If Verizon offers the same pricing structure for backbone infrastructure to everyone who asks, it's hard to fault them on this. Level3 is in a particular position given the size of the traffic served.
But if I were a mailer for something like Amazon and were responsible for 35% of packages sent during a day (fake number), it's not like I could just ask FedEx to let me use more of its trucks and get higher priority for free.
Such an arrangement with a consumer ISP is so preposterous I have to assume that Level3 and Verizon never expected flows to be symmetric.
Level3...isn't paying for that difference.
Right, because Verizon's customers pay for the difference.
Up until very recently the only time you paid for peering was when you were actually buying transit. Level 3 is definitely on the right side of this argument, not only logically - but also from the perspective of precedence. Anybody interested in learning how the internet actually works should read "The Internet Peering Playbook".
If Level3 (or Netflix) would read the Peering Playbook, they would see that they need to attract some upload traffic from Verizon to balance their flows, and get Verizon to upgrade the links (then, once the links are in place, they can drop the upload traffic). If I were Level3, I would find a backup service or image/video hosting site and convince them to let me advertise their IPs to Verizon/Comcast to balance the flows.
I looked for old level3 peering policies, and actually in 2004 they didn't mention balanced flows which was surprising, because most "Tier 1" networks have required balanced flows for peering for a long time.
If you don't like Level 3 paying Verizon/Comcast, consider the situation where Verizon has no backbone, and pays for 100% transit from a hypothetical Tier 1 provider. If Level3 doesn't have balanced flows (within usually a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio), most Tier 1's would depeer them as well (or refuse to upgrade circuits).
Or, you know, stop the bullshit and keep the Interwebz working as they've been for decades.
Verizon operates on the agreement with the customer that they can afford to meet the customers data needs at the price agreed.
Your ISP is like a courier service who agrees to collect and deliver your parcels from the parties you order from, with the understanding that you are bearing the full cost of the delivery.
At no point do they state that if the party you are ordering from will not pay them a fee, they can wilfully restrict the amount and the speed at which the parcels are delivered.
The OP's experiment demonstrated clearly that Verizon's didn't lack the ability to deliver the packets at the speed he had 'ordered' regardless of source, but was deliberately throttling the speeds when they realized they were from Netflix. By routing the connection through the VPN, Verizon lost the information the throttling was based on and the downloads arrived at a higher speed.
Any one who hosts a server knows that you can transmit terabytes of data for a tenth of the price ISPs charge customers.
It is purely corruption and venality on the part of the FCC and the legislators when entertain the arguments from the ISPs on net neutrality and ignore the breach of faith and contract that the ISPs attitude towards the customers entails.
The proper solution is the for the customers like the OP to bring class action suits against the ISPs and force them to reveal the financial and technical details to see if they have any substantial bearing on the ability of the ISPs to deliver on the services they have promised.
This whole debate is basically about the legislators and the FCC giving Verizon et al an opportunity to rip off both customers and service providers.
That's just how fucked up this situation is.
Also would like to note we pay for (and can get) 50 Mbps down. Netflix comes in at ~560 kbps and just stays there.
