The Federal Communications Commission investigation of how network interconnection problems affect the quality of Internet service began when the FCC obtained the paid peering deals Netflix signed with Comcast and Verizon.

The FCC has asked another six Internet service providers and content providers for copies of similar agreements, a commission official told Ars this week. The FCC will likely announce more details of its probe in the fall, but the public probably won't see any specific details of the contracts. Ars sent the commission a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain Netflix's contracts with Comcast and Verizon, but it was denied due to their confidential nature.

That's no surprise, but it may be tricky for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to fulfill his stated goal of explaining to the public how interconnection disagreements affect the quality of streaming video and other Web services.

When Wheeler announced the investigation in June, he said he intends to bring transparency to network interconnection:

Consumers want transparency. They want answers. And so do I. The bottom line is that consumers need to understand what is occurring when the Internet service they’ve paid for does not adequately deliver the content they desire, especially content they’ve also paid for. In this instance, it is about what happens where the ISP connects to the Internet. It’s important that we know—and that consumers know.

Given that statement, we sent a FOIA to the FCC on June 16 to obtain the Netflix deals as well as any others the commission gets a hold of. FCC Wireline Competition Bureau Chief Kirk Burgee notified us on July 15 that the FCC would not be able to meet the response deadline because it needed to "consult with two or more components of the Commission that have a substantial subject-matter interest in the determination of your request." We got a full response on July 29 and then spoke with an FCC official for further background yesterday.

"Verizon, Netflix, and Comcast filed requests for confidential treatment of the agreements in their entirety," the FCC's response to Ars said. "In support of its request for confidential treatment, Comcast asserts that, if its agreement were disclosed, competitors would gain valuable insight into the parties' business practices, internal business operations, technical processes and procedures, and information regarding highly confidential pricing and sensitive internal business matters to which competitors otherwise would not have access."

Additionally, Verizon and Netflix asserted that their agreement is exempt from FOIA disclosure under an exemption that protects trade secrets and confidential commercial or financial information.

"In this case, Verizon and Netflix assert, the agreement contains highly sensitive, detailed commercial and financial terms including pricing, forecasts, capacities, and network information that the parties do not make available to the public," the FCC's response to our FOIA said.

The FCC agreed with the companies' arguments and denied our request. That's understandable from a legal perspective and a practical one: the FCC isn't likely to get access to much confidential information if it blasts it all out to the public.

"It's important to point out that this is voluntary," the FCC official told Ars. "It's a voluntary request and there is no forcing mechanism."

The FCC official would not say which companies other than Netflix, Comcast, and Verizon got the requests, although Wheeler said in June that he would try to get information from the Google-owned YouTube. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies have direct connections with ISPs, the financial details of which have not been disclosed.

New regulations aren’t likely

The investigation was spurred by months of Netflix problems on ISPs such as Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. Eventually, Netflix agreed to pay the ISPs for direct connections to their networks in order to avoid congestion that makes streaming video play slowly, in lower quality, or not at all.

So far, it does not appear that the FCC will create any rules governing the interconnection market. "This is not a regulatory exercise. It's strictly information gathering," the FCC official said. When asked if it could turn into a regulatory exercise, the official said the next steps will "depend on what the attorneys and engineers find as a result of this information gathering."

The FCC admits that it knows little about the interconnection market. The commission's 2010 net neutrality rules, which were mostly struck down in court, targeted the "last mile"—the point from which traffic enters an ISP's network and starts traveling toward consumers. The rules did not apply to how ISPs connect their networks to the rest of the Internet. The FCC has proposed a new set of net neutrality rules, but as currently written, these rules would not cover interconnection, either.

"Interconnection is an area that the commission hasn't studied before, and to make sure the public is being served, we need to educate ourselves about how the ecosystem is working," the FCC official said.

Besides the companies the FCC has requested contracts from, the commission is "meeting with others to understand all the angles of interconnection," the official said. The commission is examining the "competitive dynamics" of the market, and "taking time to hear the different viewpoints about the state of interconnection today from the different actors in the ecosystem."

When the 2010 rules were issued, "interconnection wasn't necessarily as dominant and prevalent as it is now, these peering arrangements," the FCC official said. Streaming video and other bandwidth-heavy applications have also become more popular since then, taking over a larger share of Internet traffic.

"Chairman wheeler decided consumers needed to understand the points of congestion and how traffic is being managed across the network in general, not necessarily limited to the last mile," the official said.

It's still too early to say what types of details the FCC will make public. It's "premature to say how we would explain to consumers what's going on before we have a good handle of what's going on ourselves," the official said.