Your Broadband Company May Be Holding Your Internet Access Hostage

In Your Broadband Company May Be Holding Your Internet Access Hostage Time explains Level 3's recent complaint.

"The big broadband providers “are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers,” writes Mark Taylor, Level 3′s VP of Content and Media, in a blog post on Monday, who argued that their near-monopoly in local markets was the main factor allowing them to get away with it. “They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content.”"

"Check out the stats: Level 3 currently has 51 peers. It has congested connections with 12 of them. It’s sharing the cost of fixing six of those. Of the remaining six congested connections where the peer is refusing to share the cost of maintenance, five of them are in the U.S. and one is in Europe, and all of them operate as near- or total local monopolies."

Meanwhile, Brian Fung writes Google, Netflix lead nearly 150 tech companies in protest of FCC net neutrality plan. "In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday, the companies asked federal regulators to reconsider a proposal that critics fear would allow Internet providers to charge for faster, better access to consumers. The list includes Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, along with dozens of other firms that called the prospect of paid fast lanes 'a threat to the Internet.'"