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Would be very interesting to see what happened if the big CDN providers just depeered Comcast for 24 hours. Would certainly cost Comcast a fair amount in custo

• klodolph 12y ago
  It would also give the CDNs a fair amount in customer support calls, bad publicity, and make their paying customers angry about lost business.
  • ep103 12y ago
    I don't know about bad publicity though. To each customer support call simply say, Comcast has broken their contract with our CDN. Please call comcast. Considering Comcast is one of the two most hated companies in America right now, by a _huge_ margin, people will easily believe that, especially since in this case, it would be true. Level3 et all are enabling this behavior.
    • chimeracoder 12y ago
      > Considering Comcast is one of the two most hated companies in America right now, by a _huge_ margin And Time Warner is the second: http://bgr.com/2014/05/20/comcast-twc-customer-satisfaction-survey-study/ http://bgr.com/2014/05/20/comcast-twc-customer-satisfaction-... Nobody likes the cable companies. It would be very easy for someone to capitalize on that hatred to win public support for net neutrality; it's just a matter of crafting the right campaign.
      • coldpie 12y ago
        This is why I'm so disappointed to see the small-medium ISPs hop right in bed with Comcast and co-sign anti-net neutrality letters: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/05/top-isps-threaten-to-be-less-innovative-and-spend-less-on-network-upgrades/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/05/top-isps-threaten-to... With the national attention this issue is getting, this is a tremendous marketing opportunity to take customers away from the big dogs.
        • vanwesson 12y ago
          The smaller ISPs are just following Comcast's example: "You mean we can charge multiple times for the same data without doing any extra work? Sign us up!" All last-mile ISPs will eventually realize they can hold everyone hostage, so long as there is no significant competition.
          • aroch 12y ago
            Small ISPs also like this because they typically are very heavy on paid, private internet and don't do much peering due to having small, localized networks. They stand to gain, proportionally, the most since they can charge the people the were previously paying for access.
  • Spooky23 12y ago
    Local Television stations and sports teams have successfully used this as a way to get cable companies to fold over contracts for carriage. Everyone despises cable companies, most of the angst would go their way. After all, 9/10 people don't know what a CDN is!
  • rhizome 12y ago
    Support calls from whom? CDNs effectively sit behind the Comcast site.
    • noselasd 12y ago
      From the CDN customers. They'll be annoyed if they find out the service they paid money for isn't doing what it's supposed to do. Since they've paid the CDN, they don't care what Comcast has done or is doing - they paid the CDN, it's the problem of CDN.
      • rhizome 12y ago
        Those customers aren't getting depeered, only Comcast.
        • tonyarkles 12y ago
          I'm not sure of a more eloquent way to say this. Comcast's customers are the CDN's customer's customers.
          • apetresc 12y ago
            To play devil's advocate, those CDN customers would also be unable to access content if their power went out. But nobody would think to say the CDN isn't doing their job if Texas had a blackout, because "I'm paying you to deliver my content to Texas, dammit!" It's a bit of a stretch, but I think that's the analogy they're going for.
          • rhizome 12y ago
            Right, but that relationship, especially as applies to support and subscription, is not transitive.
        • stephengillie 12y ago
          How do you depeer my customers' provider without depeering my customers? How do you cut off a router's network access without cutting off access to the networks behind it? How do you blacklist a /8 but not one of its /24s without an exemption list? How do I prevent Bob from forking my code, but allow people who fork from Bob to fork the modifications he would do to my code? How do you join tables on 2 databases when you can't authenticate to the first?
  • letstryagain 12y ago
    Not nearly as much as Comcast though. If I have my home internet with Comcast and I suddenly can't access Netflix while my friends on other ISPs can access it just fine, then of course I'm going to call Comcast.
• deleted 12y ago
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  • Pwntastic 12y ago
    Perhaps, but something has to give. Maybe directly pissing off 4 million customers is what's needed to get these monopolies broken?
    • danielweber 12y ago
      Or people might wonder what gives these CDNs the right to declare warfare against their ISP and demand regulation of the CDNs.
  • aroch 12y ago
    > The solution to this will be worked out by the free market slowly but surely. The CDNs will eventually wise up - like Google - and get into the ISP business. CDN are in the ISP business.
  • stonemetal 12y ago
    content delivery networks (Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc) , on the other hand, are constantly at risk of being replaced. L3 is a CDN, Hulu is not. Hulu hires a CDN to get their data out there. CDNs are basically ISPs that provide high bandwidth with low latency by providing a distributed cache. Netflix has gotten in to the CDN business because at their scale none of the CDNs have been able to keep up with demand, or were not willing to pay for peering with last mile ISPs.
  • mhandley 12y ago
    Monopolies are not so difficult to break. You just need to convince the politicians that doing so will get them reelected. And to do that you need to get the public really annoyed. Now how could you possibly do that I wonder <grin>
    • hga 12y ago
      More accurately, you convince them not breaking or adequately regulating the monopoly will force them to spend more time with their families after the next election. In the experience of gun owners, this works rather well after you've actually done enough times, e.g. every bi-annual national election from 1994-2000.
• JTon 12y ago
  Too risky, no? If Comcast said the problem was not with their network, but with bit CDNs. Customers would shift their rage towards them instead. The whole thing would turn into a PR pissing match
  • jonknee 12y ago
    I'm going to go with customers being mad with who they send a big check to every month (e.g. Comcast). 99% of people only know about their ISP, not their ISP's providers.
    • Jtsummers 12y ago
      Not a big check, but they'd also be frustrated with Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime whom they also send money to each month (or year). The average customer wouldn't understand that it's the middleman causing problems, not one of the two endpoints (service provider or content provider).
      • jonknee 12y ago
        I guess that depends on the number of participating Tier-1 providers that pull the plug, if enough did it would be very obvious it wasn't Netflix with the issue because everything would grind to a crawl.
      • jimbokun 12y ago
        If ABC has a blank channel, but you can still watch CBS and NBC and ESPN just fine, the average consumer will assume the problem is with ABC. If all the channels are blank, the average consumer will blame the cable company. Similarly, if "the Internet is down", from the customer's perspective, they're going to blame the ISP, not Netflix/Hulu/Amazon.
        • Jtsummers 12y ago
          That's if everyone particpates on a Comcast/TWC/Cox/etc. boycott. If my parents can get to Amazon Prime but not Netflix, they'll assume the issue is Netflix. (ok, maybe not my parents, but the idealized tech-unaware parent)
• larrys 12y ago
  Can't do that. These are corporations with vast paper trails. The concept of "Tortious interference" [1] comes to mind but I'm certain there are other legal theories that could be employed by Comcast. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
  • rosser 12y ago
    I think the point is that Comcast is already engaging in tortious interference, and then trying to charge the upstream provider for the privilege. Sure, they could file suit on those grounds, but the countersuit would follow very quickly, and it would be joined by everyone.
• shiftpgdn 12y ago
  At this point this seems to be the ONLY solution. Knocking Comcast off the internet for 24 hours would result in a lot of attention towards net neutrality and their lackadaisical attitude towards peering.
  • diminoten 12y ago
    They wouldn't be knocked off the Internet, they'd just have to route their packets through less efficient paths, which would slow everything down significantly. The Internet would more or less shut down from traffic overload if all of Comcast's customers lost all the shortcuts that Comcast has created for them to content.
    • jeremyjh 12y ago
      Well the CDN could alternatively blackhole these networks.
• eldavido 12y ago
  This would be an unmitigated disaster. Everyone would call Comcast, Comcast would tell the story their way, and things would be even worse than they are now. They'd probably get on national nightly news talking about how their "partners" "unfairly" "cut them off from the Internet". It would be pretty interesting to watch the spin machine in action, though. 100% pure PR spin.
  • jarjoura 12y ago
    Also, don't forget that Comcast now owns NBC. :-)
  • ryanhuff 12y ago
    That's why you throttle Comcast customers. Can't it go both ways?
    • sirclueless 12y ago
      The point is that if Netflix throttles Comcast customers, the customers stream from Comcast On-Demand instead. They don't switch away from Comcast because they can't, which is what makes this an unbalanced situation.
• runeks 12y ago
  What's the purpose? We're getting to the root cause of the problem here: lack of competition. These ISPs already have the lowest customer ratings. If the customers could switch to another ISP they would. This stunt would amount to kicking a man that's lying down. He's already used to the shitty quality of his Comcast connection, but now he's being punished by CDN providers without being able to do anything about it.
  • ilaksh 12y ago
    The reason there is no competition is because of regulations and physical constraints. We need ultra wideband mesh nets. Or some kind of single strand fiber with a glue that attaches it to the street and a new law that says that laying fiber strands is a natural right of every citizen.
    • edraferi 12y ago
      I very much think broadband internet should be treated as a basic utility. however, I feel that "natural right" takes it too far. it's a very high bar to reach
• JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > Would be very interesting to see what happened if the big CDN providers just depeered Comcast for 24 hours. Those providers would very quickly get prosecuted via collusion and antitrust laws, and Comcast would gain a moral high ground to stand on, almost certainly making the situation worse.
• specialp 12y ago
  Well then all of the customers of said transit providers would leave and switch to one that can reach the millions of Comcast customers. As Level 3 said if there is a problem with peering amongst transit providers someone can switch to another provider. If there is a problem reaching Comcast customers there is nothing the customer can do or the transit provider as there is only one route to that customer. That is the leverage Comcast has now. If the end users had multiple options they would switch providers if connections were unbearably slow to YouTube or Netflix. But we know they do not so regulation is needed.