Is Verizon 'waging war' on Netflix? Not so fast.

A tech expert has alleged that Verizon is throttling bandwidth to users of certain cloud platforms. Verizon denies the charges. 

According to tech expert David Raphael, Verizon is intentionally throttling the bandwidth of big cloud services, such as Amazon's AWS. 

Here's some background: Earlier this month, Mr. Raphael, who uses AWS, noticed a marked slowdown in his Wi-fi connection. After conducting a handful of tests, Raphael reached out to a customer service rep from Verizon. The rep then allegedly admitted to Raphael that Verizon was providing "limited bandwidth to cloud providers." Finally, Raphael asked if the throttling was impacting the quality of Netflix streaming; the rep answered in the affirmative. 

"In my personal opinion, this is Verizon waging war against Netflix," Raphael wrote on his blog. "Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure is hosted on AWS. That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this." (Netflix relies especially heavily on Amazon's AWS.) 

Verizon has since issued a statement saying that it treats "all traffic equally." 

"Many factors can affect the speed of a customer’s experience for a specific site, including that site’s servers, the way the traffic is routed over the Internet and other considerations," the statement continues. "We are looking into this specific matter, but the company representative was mistaken. We’re going to redouble our representative education efforts on this topic."

Unsurprisingly, the news, which comes in the wake of a big legal victory for Internet providers, has a lot of net-neutrality activists worried about a nefarious corporate throttling plot. But as Peter Bright of Ars Technica notes, we shouldn't jump to any conclusions, especially since "customer service reps are pretty much the last people who would know about such a policy, let alone be able to inform customers of it." 

Meanwhile, over at InformationWeek, columnist Jonathan Feldman encourages doomsayers to "simmer down" – there are enough checks and balances (both digital and legal), he argues, that carriers will never be able to really throttle traffic. At least not in the long term. 

"The bottom line is this: Even if Verizon or any other carrier hasn't tried to impede bandwidth-hogging traffic in this post-Net-neutrality world, the carriers will likely experiment with it," he writes. "Would they be wolves if they left lambs alone? But they're not going to be able to get away with it because testing is relatively easy, content providers have deep pockets, and we have antitrust laws that address anticompetitive behavior."