"Comcast is willing to have the Federal Communications Commission oversee negotiations with Level 3 Communications to resolve their dispute over Internet interconnection fees, the cable operator said in a letter to the agency Tuesday," reports Multichannel News.
As the article explains, "Level 3 on Monday issued a press release complaining that Comcast had demanded a recurring fee to deliver Internet video to its customers. Comcast responded that Level 3 was trying to avoid paying standard content delivery network fees, after it recently inked a deal with Netflix to become a primary CDN provider." [To see our earlier story about Level 3’s accusations, please click here.]
The article added, "In its filing Tuesday, Comcast said Level 3’s position "is not based on any principles of fair-play on the Internet, but instead is merely the result of its rash bid to carry Netflix traffic at radically low rates, based on the flawed assumption that it could use its Tier 1 Internet backbone status to cram its CDN traffic onto others’ networks on a settlement-free basis."
Comcast is conveniently omitting the fact that is this not traffic passing through on its way to somewhere else, it is traffic REQUESTED by Comcast’s own subscribers, who are paying Comcast (dearly) already for that bandwidth. As a last-mile provider, of course they are going to carry more CDN traffic than they send.
I think they are butt-hurt that Netflix is so popular and their online video efforts to date are not. Watch them pull this off the table Post-haste once the NBCU merger stalls.