An alarming number of people don't seem to understand the different between throttling and congestion.
Comcast does not participate in Netflix's OpenConnect project. If Comcast wanted to, they could receive a 4U server from Netflix (multiple ones, in fact, for each densely populated area they service) completely free of cost. Obvious costs for power and rack space apply, although the appliance itself is free.
This would then allow your Netflix viewing to go to a 4U server at a Comcast datacenter or colocation in the area instead of having the entire South East US try to fit through a small pipe at Marietta, GA.
Comcast's stubbornness to participate in the OpenConnect project is the reason for slowness, not throttling. Of course it's going to be faster over a VPN because whatever endpoint you're connecting to most likely takes a different AS path to Netflix.
If as a provider you start installing equipment from a third party content provider, is that still called "network neutrality" though?
Why would you accept equipment from Netflix but not $STARTUP? Would accepting equipment from Netflix also force you to accept equipment from $OTHERSTARTUP (talking about http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2014/01/vc-pitches-in-a-year-or-two.... here)? What are the security implications?
Akamai and Google already do this. When you're pushing terrabits per second of data onto an ISP's network they usually agree to do something like this.
It's a win for everyone. ISP has to peer less traffic, customers get a faster experience, and Google/Akamai/Netflix benefit from reduced load.
It's purely speculation on my part, but I believe the only reason we haven't seen OpenConnect adopted at Comcast is because Comcast has everything to lose from making Netflix fast because they're also a cable company. This is where the net neutrality debate comes into play. When Comcast starts preventing the growth of third party services that don't contribute to their bottom line.
What do you mean 'of course it's going to be faster over a VPN'? The VPN is taking a non-optimal route, it should in almost all cases be of similar or slower speed. If the VPN path is fastest then comcast should be sending data in that direction.
Call it congestion if you want but it's intentional congestion caused by intentionally wrong routing.
BGP path selection does not route based on link utilization.
What you define as a "non optimal route" isn't what BGP defines as a non optimal route. An ISP can't just send all their customer traffic through any foreign network they choose. The peering location happens to be the "best" path available to Netflix and it won't change until Comcast gets off their high horse and installs Netflix's free caching servers on their network.
An ISP can't send data through any networks at all without some kind of agreement. But that's what makes them an Internet Service Provider, the fact that they have those agreements. When they fail to even properly connect to all Tier 1 networks, that starts to be a misnomer.
I actually get lower latency to Netflix's "delivery hosts" if I bring up a VPN session to IU, simply because my ISP has a private peering with IU (in a building just a few miles from here) and because IU has 100 GbE to a facility in Chicago that Netflix content is served from.
Otherwise, my traffic goes from my ISP to Time Warner to someone else (AT&T? Level3? I don't recall at the moment) before finally hitting Netflix.
If they can't route almost all traffic in the fastest direction, then something is wrong with their network on a technical level. If IU has a massively superior route, then Comcast is negligent to nether peer nor lay their own line along a similar path.
Comcast does not participate in Netflix's OpenConnect project. If Comcast wanted to, they could receive a 4U server from Netflix (multiple ones, in fact, for each densely populated area they service) completely free of cost. Obvious costs for power and rack space apply, although the appliance itself is free.
This would then allow your Netflix viewing to go to a 4U server at a Comcast datacenter or colocation in the area instead of having the entire South East US try to fit through a small pipe at Marietta, GA.
Comcast's stubbornness to participate in the OpenConnect project is the reason for slowness, not throttling. Of course it's going to be faster over a VPN because whatever endpoint you're connecting to most likely takes a different AS path to Netflix.