They'll clearly tell you that faster is better:

> Indulge in super speed and have a great online experience, whether you're browsing the Web, shopping, or streaming your favorite movies and shows.

But I want to know what my money is actually paying for.

You pay your local delivery company $X per month and they promise that they'll deliver you 1 package a day from their local depot.

But it turns out that although you're ordering a package a day from Amazon, you're not receiving a package a day. You get your stuff, but it's delayed and backed-up somewhere.

And so as an experiment you sign up for a service that will receive a package for you, re-box it in their own packaging and then send it on to you. You then start to receive a package a day again.

At that point you start wondering, are they looking at the boxes, seeing they are from Amazon and then just deciding to leave them sitting around their warehouse for a while?

And the answer is yes, even though you're paying for the service, they also want whoever is sending the package to pay them to ensure that they get their package on time.

So while their may well be all sorts of agreements between all the different parcel companies about who will do what when, it's frustrating as an end-user that there's all these weird agreements that impact me. After all I'm paying for packages to be delivered, not 'packages that are offered by our partners'.

Note that this book predated the rise of streaming video providers by more than a decade. Back then, nobody thought that delivery of content over the Internet was this simple one-sided transaction. It’s a new view of the Internet that has arisen because it suits the interests of these very lucrative streaming businesses.

If UPS decided to change the way they internally route their packages, it doesn't mean that they can just brush off promised delivery dates because "it doesn't work how you think it does." I think that's the point the OP was making.

People like to pretend like internet access service is a promise to get your packets from point A to point B anywhere on the internet at a given speed. That is based on the fiction indulged by the software folks, who just think about getting bytes between a pair of sockets and don’t care how the internet actually works. But as explained in that Cisco article, interconnection and transit has always been distinct from access, and has been the subject of separate commercial negotiations between network operators. That reflects the technical reality that the internet is not a single network, but an agglomeration of private access and transit networks. The idealized software abstraction of the internet doesn’t define what it actually is. If you read the contract that defines what you're buying, it's not promising you that idealized abstraction.

> It's still the responsibility of the ISP to deliver connectivity to other hosts on the internet at their promised speed, regardless what is necessary to do so or how it operates internally

So they don’t have to deliver 1 gbps to every end point, they just need to “do a proper job” to make the bandwidth “usable.” But what does “proper job” mean? Historically, it has meant making reasonable efforts to reach interconnection agreements with other network operators. It has not meant that you’re required to upgrade your peering so that 50%+ of all your traffic can come from a single peer, at no cost to the other peer.

> Indulge in super speed and have a great online experience, whether you're browsing the Web, shopping, or streaming your favorite movies and shows.

Because if all I am paying for is access (to Xfinity's servers), then they cannot in any way guaranteed even being able to get to a simple blog.

They're marketing copy needs to be looked at.

The Internet is a bunch of interconnected networks. Any of those networks can largely have whatever conditions they want. That is what the Internet is. Do I think it should be different, yes, but a lot of people don't. Especially those arguing against things like throttling.

No, it's not like that at all. UPS makes it clear to the customer in advance what the cost is, how long it will take, and the customer agrees. Also, UPS is not held responsible for delays that they couldn't reasonably prevent (bad weather, etc).

It's also an exaggeration of the situation; it's essentially saying "If we can't achieve perfection, then we might as well not have any standards and we can't hold anyone accountable for anything." The fact is that those speeds are obtainable in most of the common situations that people actually need them, and the throttling only occurs out of unwillingness on the part of ISPs to negotiate agreements that would allow those speeds; it's greed and/or laziness, not physical or technical limitations.

At the end of the day what you are describing is some sort of regulated nationalized Internet backbone. Which would to a larger extent support such features. As it is now if you don't like the "mix" of access you are getting, you should change providers (which could of course be a problem, but that is another issue).

You're sold a "XXXMb/s connection to 'the internet'", which people take to mean "XXXMb/s of the thing that I want, whatever that is" and not "XXXMb/s connection to the edge of the network, and then you get what you get given."

Your post totally ignores peering agreements and interconnects that are key to understanding this issue.

Or when the firefighters get throttled because their unlimited data is consumed and your house goes up in smoke.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio

That you may have a faster connection to one provider than another doesn't indicate throttling, unless you can show that the network paths are essentially the same and the slower provider isn't the one restricting the data rate.

Certainly, almost any last mile congestion should affect all providers; but most content providers are going try to deliver content from as close to the user as possible; either through CDN boxes deployed inside ISPs networks if possible, or at a nearby place where the ISP or its transit partners peer. I'm aware that Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon all run their own CDN programs, so it's very likely that they're interconnecting to the ISP on separate connections, and without insider knowledge from the ISPs or the CDNs, it's impossible to know what the congestion looks like there. CDN installations also have capacity limitations, and take time to upgrade. It's not unreasonable to assume that some content providers are running their networks hotter than others.

In the years since the Internet has become mainstream, people seem to have forgotten the bad old days of downloading a large file, and trying to figure out which mirror would serve the file the fastest; which usually meant figuring out which mirror was both physically close, and well connected to the downloader's network.

I wonder if that's true, or this is simply a result of the peering agreements that content providers have engaged in since forever.

For those who don't know: if Netflix is colocated in the same datacenter(s) as CSPire, it's possible to "throw an ethernet cable over the cage wall" and make a direct connection to CSPire. This results in dramatically better bandwidth and latency, but requires significant up-front costs (it's also not possible for every provider to peer with every distributor, for logistical reasons).

As much as I believe in the concept of net neutrality, I feel like the conversation misses many of the technical nuances of the way the internet actually works. Peering is one example: you can have an entirely "neutral" internet, but still observe dramatic differences between one provider and another, based on your network location.

(Edit: now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic. Which is a different discussion.)

> now that I've read TFA, it's pretty clear that they're not talking about favoring providers, but rather, throttling entire classes of traffic.

I must strongly disagree there. What kind of different class of traffic would give throttled traffic to different forms of on-demand video stream services? NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime. I don't see it so please name the four different classes of traffic those sites represent that a congestion system would use as identifiers.

There may be a small amount of packet loss at the time due to the ISP shaping their traffic to prevent congestion.

The higher the latency, the more the packet loss will affect the throughput.

The services you mention all use different CDNs, which may all have different latencies at the point of observation:

> NBCSports, Netflix, YouTube Premium and Amazon prime

NBCSports - I would guess Akamai, who deploys at IX and ISP Netflix - Usually Openconnect CDN devices at IX or ISP YouTube Premium - Google Global Cache deployed at IX and/or ISP (GCCs are deployed in most consumer ISPs, probably the best-distributed CDN at the moment). Amazon prime - Cloudfront, deployed mainly at IX, I am not sure if they have deployments in ISPs yet.

(I haven't tried to find more information on their approach, but https://dd.meddle.mobi/index.html seems to indicate that CDN issues shouldn't affect the way they measure, but until I do some checking on whether popular DPI platforms would be able to be fooled by this, and without them providing timestamped data, I'll have to test myself against DPI policies I wrote and I hope my ex-colleagues haven't changed too much ...)

The article makes it clear what they did, and what conclusions they drew:

"Using a previously established, peer-reviewed technique, the team conducted more than half a million data traffic tests across 161 countries. From this data, the team found that internet service providers are “giving a fixed amount of bandwidth—typically something in the range of one and a half megabits per second to four megabits per second—to video traffic, but they don’t impose these limits on other network traffic.”

Moreover, the data shown directly below that paragraph reveals little pattern in the provider/app throttling rates. The data shows mostly that video is being throttled across the board.

Could there be other explanations for this? Absolutely. Peering is just one of many plausible explanations.