10 pull dish towel from oven handle
20 drop dish towel on floor
30 wait for parent to place towel back on oven handle
40 goto 10

RUN

A few nights ago:

Me: Hey, this CD is pretty good. I like it.
A: It’s one of those Putumayo compilations.
Me: D’OH!

I guess this means that soon I will be going into stores demanding that great thing they played during the last public television fund drive.

So the latest outrage burning up the interwebs is Level 3′s complaint about Comcast:

Level 3 Communications, a central partner in the Netflix online movie service, accused Comcast on Monday of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage.

Level 3, which helps to deliver Netflix’s streaming movies, said Comcast had effectively erected a tollbooth that “threatens the open Internet,” and indicated that it would seek government intervention. Comcast quickly denied that the clash had anything to do with network neutrality, instead calling it “a simple commercial dispute.”

This news pushes a few different hot buttons, so it’s no wonder every third post on Twitter right now is basically “ZOMG EVIL COMCAST WANTS TO KILL NETFLIX!!!”

Given Comcast’s generally lousy reputation for customer service, plus their known history of traffic tampering, they make a fairly unsympathetic actor. Add in a) that people tend to love Netflix, and b) what, at least at first glance, seem to be obvious touch-points with the debate over the need for network neutrality regulations, and this is story is tailor made for a BoingBoing-fueled firestorm.

Honestly, though, nothing I’ve read yet about this story provides enough details to really form any meaningful judgement. Maybe this is a case of greedy, evil Comcast trying to protect the cable TV business—I’ll admit, that was my first reaction.

However, I’m pretty sure that Comcast and Level 3 have a peering agreement. I’m sketchy on the details of how these things work, but I *think* the idea is that if my network and your network have a peering agreement, we can exchange an agreed-upon amount of data between our two networks. It seems like what Comcast is saying to Level 3 here is the equivalent of “Hey, now that you’re delivering content for Netflix, you’re dumping a much larger amount of data into our network than we originally agreed on, so we need to change the agreement.”

If that’s the case, then I’m not sure the outrage currently pouring across the interwebs is warranted. Without any details regarding how much data they’re talking about, though, there’s no way to really say.