Senators Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Ron Wyden of Oregon sent joint letters to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile accusing the four of such practices, which are in violation net neutrality principles.
"We write to express our concern that mobile carriers may be inappropriately throttling and prioritising internet traffic from common mobile apps without the knowledge of their customers,” read the letter. “All online traffic should be treated equally, and internet service providers should not discriminate against particular content or applications for competitive advantage purposes or otherwise.”
The accusations follow a study carried out by researchers at Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Stony Brook University, using data collected from an app called Wehe. Wehe is designed to allow users to check if their ISP is throttling their services, it uses a person’s device to exchange internet traffic recorded from applications like YouTube and Spotify.
Other questions included in the letters included: Has your company put into practice policies to throttle or prioritize internet traffic for consumers? What is the purpose of these policies? Are consumers able to opt-in or opt-out of traffic differentiation? Does a customer’s choice change the price or affect their service, such as data allocation or requiring a different plan? And how do you determine which network traffic receives faster or slower treatment? Is it based on content, behavior, or IP address?
Findings from the study indicated that Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime and NBC Sports have all experienced throttling by the aforementioned carriers. One such argument for video throttling in the past has been to manage network congestion, but the report indicates that this is not the case, and is merely a way of imposing arbitrary limits on your connection forcing customers to pay more money to avoid it. Once such case was Sprint which has been accused of routinely throttling Skype a competitor to its own services.
"We found a significant number of instances of Sprint throttling our Skype tests. This is interesting because Skype’s telephony service can be construed as directly competing with the telephony service provided by Sprint,” said the report.
The news continues a long waging battle between ISPs and content providers over net neutrality rules. Last year the FCC (The Federal Communications Commission) led by chairman Ajit Pai voted 3-2 across party lines to repeal the net neutrality rules that effectively safe guard and open-internet and prohibits practices such as throttling.
The four carriers have until 6 December to respond to the claims, but there is unlikely to be many repercussions given Pai’s stance on net neutrality. However, David Choffnes, assistant professor of computer and information science at Northeastern and creator of the Wehe app, shows no signs of letting it go and is confident in his findings telling Motherboard:
"In a neutral network, all of these services can compete on a level playing field to offer a product that attracts the most users,” he said. “When an Internet provider targets a service for throttling, the playing field can tilt in favor of one service over another.”
“This is particularly problematic if the Internet provider's service is favoured, because they can use this advantage to drive users away from competing products and to ones belong to the Internet provider,” Choffnes added. “And because the competition is limited by the Internet service they are given, in some cases there may nothing they can do to regain equal footing."
