Level 3 accuses five unnamed US ISPs of abusing their market power in peering

Level 3 Communications, a company that provides bandwidth for a wide variety of customers trying to get content from point A to point B on the Internet, just accused five US Internet service providers (ISPs) and one European ISP of using their market power to interfere with how traffic flows from Level 3 onto the ISPs’ last-mile network.

The result is that customers of those ISPs experience degraded quality for services going over Level 3′s network. This is a so-called peering problem. The issue is that at the interconnection points where Netflix traffic attempts to enter the last-mile ISP’s network, there isn’t enough capacity. Usually, when that happens, the transit provider or the content provider negotiate to add more capacity by opening up more ports.

However, in recent months Level 3, Netflix and Cogent have all gone public accusing some ISPs of keeping those ports congested while trying to charge above-market rates for direct interconnection. Netflix has signed such a direct interconnection agreement with both Comcast and Verizon. But it isn’t happy about it and accuses the ISPs of abusing their market power to extract payments from content companies trying to serve the last mile.