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Two of three LECs have reduced congestion at...

Two of three LECs have reduced congestion at interconnection points they have with Level 3 since March, but it’s hardly a promising sign for an open Internet, said Level 3 Vice President-Content and Media Mark Taylor in a blog post…

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Tuesday (http://bit.ly/YNYQea). Congestion for the two LECs, which he did not name, improved only because they “forced Netflix to pay to interconnect directly with them,” the post said. Netflix signed the deal “because they had no choice: all third-party content that LEC broadband users want to see eventually has to go through LEC interconnection points. When the LEC tries to turn these interconnection points into Internet tollbooths there is no alternate path for the content to take to reach the consumers,” said Taylor. Broadband providers are offering “'Not’ Neutrality: a competitive distortion made possible by the monopoly control they have over access to their customers,” he said. “These broadband providers are willing to degrade the performance of the service they sell to their customers to extract arbitrary access charges, discriminate against third-party Internet content and harm competition."