Deutsche Telekom is violating Net Neutrality

Telekom is a bunch of strange folks. I lately was not able to send mails, from my private mail servrr to my fathers telekom mail. After investigation I found out my server got blocked. After a decade of working. I mailed them, and they told me to register my mailserver with them. I shall tell them what mails I will send from there and about what content. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Sure, thats how mail was supposed to work. Register with every mail server in the world, before you can send mail.

Their mail excerpt: This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time. For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems.

Please give us details about this system and the company using it, tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this system (MTA)?

Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>):

"There must be a domain and website with direct contact information easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."

Small tangent, but I feel like it is a good time to drop the term "net neutrality", which covers way too much ground. In the past in political discussions, the term "violation of net neutrality" was used to protest multiple different issues:

* Traffic shaping (e.g. slowing down Bittorrent traffic)

* Traffic fast lanes (pay for priority access to some content providers)

* Selective zero-rating (exclude some providers from counting towards a traffic limit)

* Artificial peering restriction (what Telekom is doing, usually via forcing content providers into paid peering agreements)

I think people should start using more specific terms that are understandable for non-technical people, because otherwise the discussion becomes confused, which helps the providers.

Lots of semi-technical people think that "violating net neutrality" refers to traffic fast lanes, because the last time this discussion entered the public was when the US social media was in uproar about FCC rules 10 years ago.

What Telekom is doing looks similar to the outside (some content providers are fast, some are not), but they can just deflect by saying that they do not intentionally throttle traffic, which is pretty much true, as they hit their physical bottlenecks. If you are knowledgable enough as a lawmaker to press them on the peering issue, they could argue that forcing peering would force them to pay rent at Internet Exchanges, just so other providers have good access. Where they also kind of have a point.

And even lots of technical people have no clue about peering, transit etc. and treat their uplink as a blackbox, a cloud in their network chart where the Internet comes out.

For the Telekom case, we would need a different legislation, for example make paid peering agreements between providers illegal or at least regulated, which would then be an incentive to be generally well-connected (free mutual peering is usually considered a win-win scenario unless you are Deutsche Telekom and can use your market power to bully other market participants into another form of rent extraction). And that means that lawmakers and the public need to understand first the specific problem we are fighting.

Not sure it’s the same issue but in Hungary they (DT) refuse to use/pay Cloudflare so in peak hours every single site outside the country loads incredibly slow because of the constant re-routing. Everything has to go through Frankfurt even though CF would have alternate direct routes

https://kozosseg.telekom.hu/topic/40322-cloudflare-magyar-te...

https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingHungary/comments/1ngv2pt...

https://telex.hu/techtud/2024/06/21/deutsche-telekom-cloudfl...

At least they are cheap. 25€ a month for 2gbps/1gbps so I can’t complain about that

They also offer 4gbps/2gbps for 40€ but at this point I’m not even sure what to use that for (besides torrent seeding)

I own a FTTH connection to Telekom since 2018, as the only provider in my street, allowed to install an internet connection (only glass fiber).

Since then, I have always used my own device and I maintain a GitHub Snippet in how to connect OpenWRT modem (and by extension, any other modem that supports pppoe), rather than their Huawei SpeedPort crap or the more expensive Fritz Box). Link to Gist : https://gist.github.com/madduci/8b8637b922e433d617261373220b...

I use PiHole in my own network, circumnavigating the DNS limitations, using Quad9 as my main DNS provider, but Unbound is on my to-do list.

The most concerning limitation in the German market is the unavailability of native Glass Fiber modems, that can accept as input a Glass Fiber connection: at the moment, providers install their own Glass Fiber modem. Without it, you can't actually have an internet connection at home

Telekom is well known for the crappy service - but they have a de facto monopoly. For example, when it rains, the line goes down where I live.

Solution: I got my Starlink. 3x speed. No crappy service. Weather independent. And surprinsingly cheaper ( 40 euros vs 45 ) .

[ as much as I do not like Musk & co, this is a real useful thing he build for the mankind - internet everywere from sattelite ]

I know about this issue so it's great that something is being done about it, but the page really needs a text explainer instead of the just a video.

I unfortunetely have Deutsche Telekom as my ISP and I can confirm that in the evening websites that use Cloudflare have a latency of one minute or simply do not load at all.

I don’t understand why anyone that serves the German market would use Cloudflare. Regardless of who is at fault, you are losing a lot of customers that way.

I just ended my contract with them. I could not reach my own raspberry pi Homepage which uses cloudflare. They called me and asked why I ended the contract, I told them about cloudflare, but that my cancellation is final, and magically my Homepage now works again!

I literally could not ssh into several of my servers since last week, and could only do so through my berlin server.

Yes, I have to rent a local server to proxy all my home network through it, otherwise it is unreliable or outright does not work. It is absurd.

I like the subtle bit of trolling they did with the page color: DT had registered that shade of magenta as a trademark, made it a core part of their brand and generally was VERY vocal in public about "owning" that color. [1, 2]

Though more recently they seem to have lost that protection. [3]

So if that page now deliberately uses the "Telekom color" to call out their bad behavior, that's a statement on its own.

[1] https://adage.com/article/digital/t-mobile-says-it-owns-excl...

[2] https://www.exali.de/Info-Base/magenta-markenstreit (in German)

[3] https://chiever.nl/en/blog-en/t-mobile-loses-the-protection-...

I have a contract with a smaller German ISP (Pyur), they do throttling too, uploading to Backblaze quickly gets capped to a few hundred bytes, sometimes the connection gets aborted. Using Mullvad or Tor gets around that. I considered switching to Telekom or Vodafone, gave up because they are even more expensive and now this.

The only ISP I have access to is Deutsche Telekom and I often have problems with websites loading slowly. A few more years before other ISPs can provide internet in my new development area. I can't understand, why they are allowed to have a monopoly in some areas.

Nothing will come out of this unless all former state monopolists are targeted at the same time.

Why are you leading your visitors to your channel on a monopolist site? To bring ad revenue? There's no need for video for your type of content in the first place.

I get it - a 2026 "hackers" campaign for binging yt. And in case you haven't noticed: appealing to the net neutrality debate of last millenium is meaningless with just a bunch of monopolists left on the net profitting of vast public investments. The kind of thing traditionalist "hackers" in it for social recognition would be wasting their time on.

The laws should be changed. Corporate overlords thinking they can milk citizens should have mandatory jail times - something reasonable like a full decade or so. That way their'll behaviour would quickly change too and they'd have to stop those "we can slow them down and they can not do anything about it" shenanigans.

Germany always surprise me with continuous contradiction in their society.

Largest economy in eu but very unstable and riddled with wierd burocracy.

Strongest worker protection, but very large amount of lobbysm.

Most advanced railway system in eu, transformed into a joke by interdiction from said lobbies.

You have to pay a "radio tax" to help funding press and keep it independent, but then fuck net neutrality.

And I could continue with more point, but I don't want to get too political.

237 pages, wow...

??? Yes its called peering agreements

Complaining about net neutrality in 2026 with yt videos. What a joke by pseudo-"hackers."