Neurological Correlates

Off topic post - Possible Internet Use Monitoring by Time Warner Cable Road Runner - Preventing efficient YouTube streaming.

Time Warner Cable Roadrunner service seems to be intentionally monitoring traffic to YouTube.  To make matters worse, they seem to run the Youtube request through a private network (address: 10.33.160.21). This private node goes into “time out” latency and degrades my Youtube viewing.

(For Background on my computer woes, scroll down for previous posts).

I have Time Warner Road Runner broadband service. Time Warner also sells cable TV. When I watch TV via the internet that cannibalizes their cable TV business. So, instead of developing an innovative business model, it looks like they are merely disabling the competition to maintain or increase market share.

Think about it like this:  You buy a train ticket to interesting Youtube hotel. The YouTube Hotel competes with the one owned by the railroad franchisee- the blah Time Warner Hotel.  So the railroad  takes you a really long way, through some secret tracks not even on the original map, the trip takes forever and ruins your experience. This defeats the enjoyment of staying at the Youtube Hotel . You had no idea when you bought the ticket they’d do that. Next time, you just book a room at the Time Warner hotel — sort of blah, no pool — but you get there faster and on public tracks. Now the blah Time Warner hotel can charge double and reduce their level of service — not based on merits in the marketplace but based on their rail road franchise.

Why would Time Warner hypothetically do this?  If I can watch for free-with-ads on YouTube, why would I ever go back to cable TV? So they want to do a Tonya Harding (not to mix to many metaphors): kneecap Youtube by slowing it down in a private-secret-time-out internet address. What is the practical effect? When I want to watch a video, it is no longer instantaneous, and, it is intermittent. Gee, cable tv is so much easier. . .(all this is hypothetical, of course).

I’m not an expert, but this smells like the old Microsoft “pain of change” tying violations back in the ’90’s. Microsoft made Internet Explorer the default browser in Windows, and polluted java to work only with IE, so that both consumers and producers had to use Microsoft products. (I followed Microsoft’s antitrust epic saga as an interested observer with some dread, knowing that when all those DOJ lawyers were done with Microsoft they’d go after pharma for something, and they did. But I digress. . .)

It looks like Time Warner Road Runner is doing “predatory innovation” -  intentionally eliminating interoperability of competing services — when they previously together worked just fine.  Just like Netscape worked on  Windows just fine, until Microsoft messed.

Privacy - isn’t my internet request private at some level? I don’t want the world to know I enjoy watching cats on a treadmill (here and here and here). Oops. I mean hypothetically, if I thought cats on a treadmill videos were a great way to waste time during a the waiting period before a conference call begins.

TWC claims “not enough room on the network! We have to manage somehow!” I call BS. Prove that the least onerous way to manage your business is by defeating the ease of using Youtube.

Now for the technical part:   Here’s a “trace route” which you can do at home (this harkens back the days before Windows when you had to use commands - brings up a black box):

start–> run –> cmd–>tracert  www.youtube.com

You get a trace from your modem to the destination website. For the one below, I deleted my personal information (modem address, “hops” at nodes 1-8), but here’s what “hops” 9-15 look like for me. Note that “tbone.rr” is the TW network, and it just disappears at hop 10. At hop 11, the IP address — 10.33.160.2– is within a block of private addresses on the “Blackhole” server.  This is routing to a private network upstream of the public network — which is, apparently, not best practices for network providers.

Hops 12, 13, 14 are “time outs” - who knows what happens here ?

And then TWC gives me permission to visit Youtube.

9    56 ms    55 ms    56 ms  ae-0-0.pr0.dfw10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.181]
10    59 ms    58 ms    55 ms  66.109.9.98

11     *       58 ms    68 ms  10.33.160.21

12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
15    74 ms    78 ms    65 ms  youtube.com [208.65.153.251]

Do you want to know a secret? So, shhh, come closer to the screen, and I’ll whisper the secret fix: set Youtube to Australia as the default country.

Update in response to comment below: Here’s the trace route a couple jumps sooner

5    21 ms    81 ms    20 ms  tge4-0-0.lsanca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com [76.167.2.56]

6    76 ms    19 ms    20 ms  so-2-3-0.cr0.dfw10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.102]
7    22 ms    18 ms    21 ms  ae-0-0.cr0.lax30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.5]
8    52 ms    54 ms    51 ms  ae-3-0.cr0.hou30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.1]
9    56 ms    55 ms    56 ms  ae-0-0.pr0.dfw10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.181]
10    59 ms    58 ms    55 ms  66.109.9.98
11     *       58 ms    68 ms  10.33.160.21
12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
15    74 ms    78 ms    65 ms  youtube.com [208.65.153.251]

Previous post from 06.25.08:

It took me (since I don’t have an IT department) over 6 hours to upload Service Pack 3 and figure out how to get it to talk to my antivirus software and then my wireless unsecured network was refusing to recognize me. Then, it turns out that you also have to upload the newest flash player to re-do the damage done by Service Pack 3’s old flash player which has some kind of security defect or something. And that was on one desktop computer. This is probably the best advertising for Google ever.

Updated complaining 07.24.08: So, I have now spent over $500 calling my computer repair folks, who are great (”Make It Work”, free advert for you guys),  getting the software up to speed, and then my internet connection slowed to a crawl. Turns out Time Warner Cable is now selling “tiered” services — and, of course, I was in the slow lane. I had no idea. So I paid $10 more a month for a faster lane (the fastest would have unbundled my cable package, and cost like $50/mo more). Even paying more didn’t help — so the cable guys came out and spruced up all the connections. Still didn’t help. Finally the city did cable neurosurgery, now it’s back to where it was before they tiered the service.  As soon as there is some other alternative, I’m ditching Time Warner — they put in tiered internet without telling me, they messed up my connection, they added fees on my cable TV I didn’t know about (also), so I decided to just go outside and enjoy the sun.