If any broadband provider ever hoped to mickey with customer access to popular Internet services, that hope has probably been extinguished by a brief technical glitch that barred some Comcast customers from accessing Google, and possibly YouTube. Jon Pettit at the Bostonist noted yesterday that field reports suggested that Comcast customers in Massachusetts could no longer access Google-related services, including Gmail, Google and Blogspot, and some users complained they couldn’t access YouTube.
While he wanted to blame Comcast, Pettit speculated that Google was the source of the problem because Comcast doesn’t provide technical support for open source Firefox. Later in the day, he got an email from Comcast explaining that it was experiencing an isolated, random server problem.
Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker said that “Google is at the mercy of the ISP’s. Is this a preview of Net Neutrality?” AP even ran a couple of pieces on the outage, with the final report noting that network problems are common. The inability to access Google was even the top story on Digg for a while.
With this much attention paid to a relatively brief and minor technical glitch, sensitivities are obviously running high that broadband providers might start reordering the Internet in a way that disfavors some content or applications providers. I must admit that if I suddenly experienced problems gaining access to Google, I too might wonder, perhaps only in the back of my mind, if my broadband provider had something to do with that.
For this reason, namely because users are going to make a big, immediate stink, I would wager that broadband service providers aren’t likely to play around with the performance of popular services. If they had any plans to do so before yesterday, broadband providers have put those notions on the back burner today.
Update: Steve Bryant at eWeek has this superb analysis of the paranoia sparked by the Comcast-Google “thing.” Please read.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:31 AM|Comments(2)
That's true about the popular services, but what about services *before* they become popular. All an ISP has to do is muck with it a little so that users think the service isn't stable and it won't become popular.
Posted by: Jenny Levine at September 27, 2006 5:58 PM
Thanks for the kind words!
Posted by: Steve Bryant at September 27, 2006 2:27 PM
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