AT&T and Verizon lose bid to maintain secrecy of French interconnection deals

AT&T and Verizon have failed in their attempt to block the French telecoms regulator from examining their secret interconnection agreements – deals that may be key to the erosion of network neutrality.

The regulator, ARCEP, is concerned that quiet battles between bandwidth providers and Internet service providers may in effect be degrading the quality of popular web services for French consumers — one specific case involves subscribers of the ISP Free getting lousy YouTube performance. The worry is similar to that in the US, where a spat between ISP Verizon and bandwidth provider Cogent Communications is thought to have been messing up Netflix performance for Verizon’s customers. This all comes down to net neutrality. Data carriage providers have traditionally carried each other’s traffic for free under so-called peering agreements, which have been essential to making sure all internet services get an equal chance for delivery at decent quality. Now, with high-bandwidth services such as video on the rise, consumer ISPs are seeing a chance to extract cash out of the internet backbone or bandwidth providers by charging them for delivering heavy traffic to the end user.