Verizon this week denied taking advantage of its recent net neutrality victory to throttle traffic and punish bandwidth-heavy services like Netflix.
"We treat all traffic equally, and that has not changed," Verizon Communications said in a statement.
At issue is a blog post from David Raphael, a developer with iScan, who said that he and his boss had been experiencing significant service slowdowns with their Verizon FiOS Internet service. Raphael did a speed test at home and compared that to speeds while hooked up to VPN, and his home connection was much slower (40kB/s vs. 5000kB/s).
Raphael contacted Verizon support and after a lengthy trouble-shooting session, he asked the rep if Verizon was "limiting bandwidth to cloud providers like Amazon's AWS service?" The rep replied: "Yes, it is limited bandwidth to cloud providers."
Netflix and a number of other popular Web-based services use Amazon AWS, so Raphael concluded that the move is "Verizon waging war against Netflix."
"Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure is hosted on AWS. That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this," he wrote.
Verizon, however, denied that this was the case. "Many factors can affect the speed a customer experiences for a specific site, including, that site's servers, the way the traffic is routed over the Internet, and other considerations," the company said. "We are looking into this specific matter, but the company representative was mistaken. We are going to redouble our representative education efforts on this topic."
A Netflix spokesman declined to comment. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The news comes shortly after an appeals court ruled in Verizon's favor and struck down the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. Those rules banned ISPs from discriminating against specific apps or services in order to boost service to others. If Verizon was experiencing a traffic surge, it could slow down its traffic overhaul, for example, but could not cut off access to Netflix or BitTorrent, for example, to ease traffic woes.
Though this whole debate started when Comcast was accused of blocking access to BitTorrent back in 2007, the ISPs claim that competition keeps them from nefarious blocking policies and that the FCC's net neutrality rules serve only as an impediment to innovation. Basically, they agree with the what the rules say, but do not believe the FCC has the authority to regulate the issue. When they were put in place, Verizon sued on that point, and the court agreed.
Supporters of the net neutrality rules argue that it's needed to keep ISPs in check, and to provide consumers - like Raphael - with the means to complain if they believe they are being treated unfairly.
Right now, the FCC is weighing its options as to the future of its rules. But several Democratic members of Congress have introduced a bill that would reinstate the rules while the FCC decides what to do.