Without Net Neutrality, ISPs ‘Throttle’ Online Video 24/7: Study

In an exhaustive study in which they ran more than 650,000 tests of internet speeds, researchers have found that online service providers deliberately slow, or “throttle,” online video data download speeds far more frequently than previously believed—or that the big telecom companies have admitted. In fact, according to a report on the study by The San Jose Mercury News, the big ISPs are throttling data “all the time.” Carriers such as AT&T, Verizon and others have long acknowledged that they throttle data at peak usage times of the day, but according to one of the study’s authors, David Choffnes of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, the companies throttle data, “24/7, and it’s not based on networks being overloaded.” Under Obama-era net neutrality rules, ISPs were prohibited from throttling data without publicly informing customers of when the traffic slowdowns would happen. But those rules were repealed last year by the now-Republican controlled Federal Communications Commission.  Most of the throttling occurred over cellular networks, with the ISPs throttling data over wifi networks much less frequently.  The researchers from Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst tested speeds for major video streaming platforms, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube. But with by some estimates as much as 30 percent of internet data consumed by porn, throttling of porn video streams appears likely, though the study does not encompass porn traffic. But the researchers who conducted their study, "A Large-Scale Analysis of Deployed Traffic Differentiation Practices," starting last year and into 2019, found that AT&T slowed YouTube traffic an astonishing 74 percent of the time, and Netflix data 70 percent of the time. But AT&T did not slow Amazon Prime at all. T-Mobile, however, throttled Amazon Prime traffic 51 percent of the time. The study began in January 2018, six months before the net neutrality rules were repealed, according to Forbes.com, suggesting that even with net neutrality rules in place, the big telecoms were able to selectively slow online traffic with impunity. However, the FCC voted to repeal the net neutrality rules in December of 2017, a month before the study’s researchers began running tests. The repeal finally took effect in June of 2018. AT&T said that the study was misleading. “We don't throttle, discriminate, or degrade network performance based on content. We offer customers choice, including speeds and features to manage their data,” the company said in a statement to Forbes. Photo By Slowking4 / Wikimedia Commons