French ISP accused of throttling access to Dailymotion

Contractual dispute or technical glitch?
On Saturday, in a post on its official blog (French version), Dailymotion accused the ISP of having slowed down the customers’ website access speed. Dailymotion alleged that Neuf Cegetel had deliberately lowered the interconnection bandwidth to the website from 10 Giga bits per second (Gbps) to a crippling 1 Gbps. For Dailymotion, this was a highly political move as it occurred whilst the ongoing negotiations with the ISP had reached a stalemate regarding the cost of such interconnections.

Access to high speed interconnections is vital for bandwidth-intensive content providers such as video-sharing websites. 01net. reports that the heavy bandwidth users often enter agreements, known as peering agreements, with ISPs to secure the connection speed they need to operate smoothly.

The deadlock over the pricing of the peering agreement led to retaliation from the ISP, Dailymotion alleged. The website had to find an alternative to allow Neuf’s customers to access its service. Dailymotion explains they asked Limelight, their CDN (Content Delivery Network), to take charge of their traffic but recognized it had been unable to deliver a satisfactory service at such short notice.

Neuf Cegetel, in an interview to ZDNET France, refuted the accusations made by Dailymotion, and explained the problem resulted from the fact that Dailymotion had redirected its traffic and that it took [Neuf] a bit of time to adjust to these modifications. Neuf regretted “the lack of tact of Dailymotion’s warning” especially since the problem was resolved as early as Monday.

On Monday, the problem was indeed solved and Dailymotion withdrew the alert from its website. Dailymotion also adopted a much less sanguine tone and failed to reiterate its allegations against Neuf. The statement posted on its blog just said that the problem “originated in a disturbance in the management of traffic exchanges between Neuf and Dailymotion” thus seemingly adopting the ISP’s position.

Irrespective of whether the root cause was a technical glitch or rough negotiation tactics, this episode illustrates the strains of the increasing demand for faster internet connection on the existing network infrastructure.

The wider net neutrality debate
As new services such as video-sharing website require ever more bandwidth, the internet infrastructure needs to be upgraded to meet these demands. Telecom companies have been investing heavily in new network capacities (notably in fiber optic) and think content providers should finance some of theses costs.

As Professor Michael Geist points out, the Dailymotion incident comes on the heels of a similar dispute, in the United Kingdom this time, between the BBC and ISPs. Ars Technica reported that “UK ISPs had banded together to tell the BBC that they would start to throttle the Corporation's new iPlayer service because it could overwhelm their networks.” The soon-to-be-launched iPlayer service would allow users to download BBC shows up to one week after their release. The ISPs predicting that the service will be very popular are “now concerned that iPlayer traffic will degrade the experience for all users of their networks.” However, the ISP claimed that “traffic shaping could be avoided should the BBC agree to pay them cash to help cover the cost of upgrading their networks” Ars Technica report that “negotiations on the issue were continuing.”

The debate about how and who should be paying for the upgrading of the infrastructure has been going on for some time in the US where it is often referred to as the Net neutrality debate. Advocates of net neutrality argue that ISPs should not charge customers different fees according to their bandwidth usage for fear it would create a tiered system where only the largest corporations such as Google and Yahoo would be able to pay for theses services. This would make the internet less accessible to new entrants, stifle competition and jeopardize the open-to-all philosophy that has underpinned the development of the internet so far. Opponents of net neutrality argue that price discrimination is the only way to finance the much needed and hugely expensive improvements to the infrastructure.

For a much more illuminating introduction to the very complex net neutrality debate read the piece by Professors Susan Crawford and Christopher Yoo.