Simmer down, Net neutrality doomsayers. We will expect carriers to experiment with traffic impairment, but we are able to also expect them to fail.

It was just a matter of time. The simmer surrounding the hyped “death of Net neutrality” escalated to a boil Wednesday when a blogger who works for a cloud startup claimed that Verizon is now using the chance to “wage war against Netflix” and other content providers.

The blog writer, David Raphael, claimed that traffic to and from his Amazon Web Services infrastructure was much slower on his Verizon connection than it was on another carrier’s connection. Raphael said he measured performance in numerous other ways, and that through the use of the time honored rule-in/rule-out methodology, established that Verizon was the matter. Raphael said he had a talk with a Verizon customer support rep (he posted a screenshot of that chat on his blog) by which he asked point blank: “Is Verizon now limiting bandwidth to cloud providers like AWS?” To which the Verizon rep allegedly replied: “Yes, it’s limiting bandwidth to cloud providers.” Raphael said he went a step further, asking the rep: “This is because my Netflix is bad now?” To which the rep allegedly replied: “Yes.”

Verizon denied the claim — particularly that a Verizon rep admitted to the blogger that the carrier slows down AWS and other cloud services — using standard corporate double-talk. In a press release reported by The Washington Post, Verizon said:

We treat all traffic equally, and that has not changed. Many factors can affect the rate of a customer’s experiences for a particular site, including that site’s servers, the best way the traffic is routed over the net, and other considerations. We’re looking into this specific matter, however the company representative was mistaken. We will redouble our representative education efforts in this topic.

Yes, sooner or later we’re going to tell our customer reps to not rat us out, and craft specific punishments for doing so.

To be fair, it isn’t entirely clear whether the blogger was experiencing peering congestion or true rate limiting. You can not tell without more rigorous testing than the blogger was ready to do. But under-the-covers traffic management is a standard practice of any network operator.

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Whether or not the blogger or Verizon is telling the reality, there’s still no reason to believe that the web as we all know it truly is about to soften down as a result of end of Net neutrality rules, which had forbidden carriers from giving certain sorts of content preferential treatment over different kinds until a court overturned those rules last month. Moreover, enacting stifling new regulations won’t help and will harm carrier competition.

As our friends within the application performance management world have taught us, we are living in a highly testable and transparent Internet world, and unless there’s massive collusion among backbone providers, it’ll be pretty darned obvious when someone is intentionally slowing down traffic from specific content providers.

It’s all “comparative anatomy.” That’s, in the event you simulate traffic from Netflix (or every other provider of huge Content) coming from one endpoint, and simulate “carrier traffic” from another, and “carrier traffic” is doing fine but Netflix isn’t, you’veyou’ve got you have got an impairment. (In practice, the test will be a little bit more complicated, but that is the general idea.)

As soon as I read Raphael’s blog post, I predicted we’ll see a brand new service serving the content industry: performance monitoring of carriers. Just you watch. There’s already a project that uses consumer endpoints to watch bandwidth for the FCC, among other agencies. It’s only a question of whether existing APM service vendors equivalent to Keynote and Gomez will tweak their software for this specific use, whether a startup will jump on it, or whether content juggernauts together with Netflix, Apple, and Google will roll their very own performance monitoring into various datacenters and millions of viewing endpoints nationwide. (Interestingly, since I first read the blog post, Raphael’s company has provide you with a Net neutrality testing tool.

The final analysis is that this: Although Verizon or the other carrier hasn’t tried to impede bandwidth-hogging traffic on this post-Net-neutrality world, the carriers will likely experiment with it. Would they be wolves in the event that they left lambs alone? But they are not going so one can escape with it because testing is comparatively easy, content providers have deep pockets, and we’ve antitrust laws that address anticompetitive behavior.

And so begins another arms race. Quiet down for amusing and fascinating times. Just know that the web ain’t melting down anytime soon.

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Jonathan Feldman is Chief Information Officer for the town of Asheville, NC, where he encourages innovation through better business technology and process. Asheville is a rapidly growing and popular city; it’s been named a Fodor top travel destination, and is the location of … View Full Bio

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