Verizon denies using net neutrality victory to sabotage Netflix, Amazon

After a federal court decided in January 2014 that the government couldn't prohibit Internet providers from slowing or blocking Web traffic, at least one Internet service provider (ISP) is being accused of taking advantage of the ruling.

A Texas man named David Raphael wrote on his blog that Verizon was intentionally throttling Netflix subscribers and other Internet users who rely on Amazon's cloud computing service. Verizon quickly denied the complaint, saying it continues to treat all traffic equally. Raphael, a software engineer for the cloud-based security firm iScan Online, said he was first alerted to the problem on Jan 26 when the president of his company complained of "major slowdowns" while using iScan remotely. After determining that nothing was amiss with iScan's product, Raphael returned home to find that his own connection to Amazon Web Services -- on which iScan runs -- had been degraded. Connections to AWS were limited to 40 kBps, Raphael said -- about 240 times slower than the 75 Mbps fiber optic connection Raphael was paying for. Raphael discovered that even content hosted on AWS by others, including Netflix, was also slower. When Raphael contacted Verizon about the issue, a customer representative acknowledged that Verizon was "limiting bandwidth to cloud providers." Verizon said it was investigating the report and that the customer rep was misinformed.