Bad Examples of Net non-Neutrality Causing Problems

In a recent discussion thread elsewhere, this story was offered as an example of the bad things that can happen when we don't have net neutrality regulations. A broadband provider was blocking internet voice services, presumably to get customers to purchase its phone service. This does seem to be a clear example of the kinds of behaviors net neutrality advocates are warning us about. Touche?

Not quite. A few things struck me. It's old. It's from over ten years ago. So plainly they were not using Obama's 2015 neutrality regulations. The FCC had the power to stop this kind of behavior prior to those regulations. Also, the age of the example suggests the commenter had trouble finding a more recent example. Finally, the article itself makes plain that this is not a widespread practice:

Vonage's Citron said Madison River was the largest company to attempt port-blocking against Vonage customers. "We've identified one or two others that are very small," Citron said, adding that the information will be forwarded to the FCC. Many large cable companies have pledged never to engage in the practice.

Why was such an old example chosen? Aren't there more recent examples of this behavior? What is the canonical list? Maybe this one by the Freepress.net blog. The beginning of my post (this one you're currently reading) was a little unfair; I'm just picking on one anonymous commenter who chose a poor example to support his argument. So let's start with the FreePress list. Superficially plausible. It looks like some of these might be legitimate neutrality violations in the "monopolist throttling competitors" sense.  But then again some of these look more like "ISP's finding and throttling bandwidth hogs that are slowing down the network," which I will argue is a legitimate behavior that benefits customers (at least the customers who aren't themselves the bandwidth hogs).  Others look like security protocols that inadvertently blocked legitimate content, as any security protocol with a non-zero error rate will inevitably do. Here is a thorough fact-checking of the FreePress piece. Read them all. There is a non-cynical explanation for all of these (except maybe the Madison River example that I started this post with). At the very least it looks like the FreePress list made some glaring omissions. For the most part, ISPs changed their behavior as soon as customers started complaining, before the FCC could even respond. The TELUS example was literally trying to protect the physical safety of people being threatened by online agitators as part of a labor dispute. (Omitting details in which your sympathetic victims are behaving like violent goons shows really bad faith on the part of FreePress.) The overall narrative that this tells is that ISPs respond quickly to consumer complaints. They do sometimes throttle bandwidth hogs, but move quickly to try to accommodate them because that is how their customers want to use the internet! Sometimes they introduce security features or error-correction features that backfire, and quickly backpedal when customers complain. This looks to me like a free market working, and working for its customers.

Neutrality advocates should come up with some better examples. They need to distinguish between legitimate practices, legitimate mistakes, and true "throttling thy competitor" neutrality violations. Maybe there is a better, more thoroughly vetted list of true neutrality abuses. Feel free to share if you think you have that. My quick search for "list of net neutrality abuses" finds the same few examples being recycled over and over again. Sorry, maybe there's a legitimate worry here and I'm just too dense to see it. But this looks to me like much ado about nothing. "Net Neutrality: the solution in search of a problem."

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Just to clarify. I didn't stack the deck by cherry-picking a list of poor, easily-debunked examples of net neutrality abuses. The FreePress link was my first hit in a Google search of "list of net neutrality abuses"; the link from HighTechForum debunking it is the third hit. Scolling down, I see basically the same list of "abuses" repeated in various forums. Presumably the FreePress piece represents a "best attempt" by some very motivated people, and it was (in my opinion) easily debunked with a cursory review of the actual facts. Also, I wasn't trying to set up a "straw-man" by starting with the Madison River story; I'm dragging the reader through the journey as I lived it, showing you what I found in roughly the order that I found it.