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Netflix CEO Accuses Comcast of Not Practicing Net Neutrality
braindrainbahrain writes "Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has a Facebook page in which he posts a short gripe about Comcast. It seems watching video through the Xfinity app on an Xbox does not counting towards your cap on your Comcast data plan. All other services, Netflix included, do. To quote Hastings: 'For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all. The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment. In what way is this neutral?'"
The difference, of course, is that you need a Comcast cable TV subscription in order to have the Xfinity app not count toward your monthly data usage allowance. Then again, you can't exactly sign up for a similar plan through Netflix or Hulu.
That is, eager to complain about - and pay to eliminate - regulations and laws meant to protect the consumer as a danger to "the free market" and "competition" while being equally eager to eliminate "the free market" and "competition".
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Not entirely true. The bulk of the costs are the last mile (which remains the same whether it's Comcast or Netflix doing the streaming). Internet transit costs almost nothing these days, especially at the commit levels that a large carrier like Comcast has...
It violates antitrust laws. Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming video services should just sue Comcast and get it over with it.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
We don't have the $1 mil to make them pay attention to us, that's why.
In my area, Comcast uses DNS Hijacking to favor their "search engine" any time you misspell something in the url bar. Sounds like more of the same to me. 21st century highwaymen.
It's been said here before, these people are for the free market until they're not. When the free market turns against them they don't "innovate," they instantly go whining to their favorite congress person with a moneybag in their hand.
It's the same for everyone that claims to be "free market." There isn't one truly free market person in Congress on in Corporate America. Whenever you hear that it should cause your B.S. detector to go off.
Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side. You could be arguing that it travels less far, because the data already resides on Comcast's network (Hulu being sponsored/owned/controlled in part by Comcast), but that has nothing to do with bandwidth, and all to do with.... wait for it... Net Neutrality. In one case, the same packets (assuming the very same file exists on both Netflix and on Hulu), are traveling through the Comcast network, with an endpoint in a Comcast controlled network. In the other case, it is traveling through the Comcast network with an endpoint outside of the Comcast controlled network.
This is EXACTLY what Net Neutrality is about it.
And this is EXACTLY what everybody has been screaming bloody murder about since the ISPs got in bed with content, and since ISPs became big enough to be monopoly/duopoly providers. This exact beehavior was predicted by a number of people, and it will end in
* Internet access that works exactly like cable channel access
* a death sentence for any site that isn't paying off the ISPs to be on a special access program
Welcome to the future Internet. It's called TV.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I made a comment some months about how this will happen, as the reason why isp's are rolling out bandwidth limits and creating artificial scarcity. most(all) of the isp's doing this have such services of their own and this is an easy way to create incentive to use those services and not competing services. for the consumer it sucks bigtime of course - and the big isp's doing this have no incentive to upgrade their services to higher bandwidths since it works as a method to drive users towards their own services, which even if they don't make money(for the isp) surely count against somebodys bonus matrix plans(which are bullshit of course too).
this is the reason why they don't want net neutrality, why they don't want uncapped connections. they just want to promote their walled garden bullshit services. content providers don't mind as it let's them "monetize" the shows in the old fashion - meaning lots of regional licensing and their staff sitting at bullshit lunches getting hammered while selling something the consumer should be able to buy/view globally directly.
they should at least be forced to advertise the fact and be forced to advertise their internet connections as comcast-network connections.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms"
Actually having used Comcasts service, it streams the Hulu feeds through their own Xfinity web app. So essentially the Xfinity web app is a wrapper for Hulu for paid cable customers. In fact if its a show that appears on both, the Hulu feed is likely to be faster as its not going through 2 different gateways to get to you. I have tested this myself with numerous network shows. I only realized this after a redirect was screwed up and it showed the stream was coming from Hulu, NOT Xfinity.
"Apples to oranges."
Nope the last mile is the last mile no matter what. 0s and 1s don't change just because you use a different service. Maybe get a better understanding of streaming media and understand that the ONLY reason they are doing this has nothing to do with the costs associated, but everything to do with making people THINK there are different costs associated when in reality there are not.
Its lying to the government/customers enough to completely obliterate the fact that they are in reality a utility and should be regulated and beaten into submission as such. Hell Comcasts whole plan to produce "original content is all a elaborate scheme to convince people they are more than what they are, a utility. But making a company not screw customers and not scheme and violate basic civil and federal laws "would be communist."
Our forfathers are rolling in their graves at just how much the rich control this country now.
Data from Comcast to customer is half the bandwidth compared to data from Netflix to Comcast to customer.
Comcast is both a provider of internet services and a provider of content. What it is doing is bundling its services together to gain an unfair market advantage. It's the same kind of monopolistic practice that Microsoft got sued by, er... every country it does business within. The legal precident here is obvious, as is the conclusion. Whether you call it net neutrality or not, Comcast is doing something unethical and probably illegal as well.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The FCC has remarkably little enforcement capability. Likely, the goal was to name & shame in the most publicly visible way possible, so Netflix could gain some traction on this issue quickly, instead of having to wait around for months for the FCC to do anything useful.
If that is true, then ANY traffic that remains solely within Comcast's network should not affect the data cap.
Not really true. Comcasts WAN is part of the internet. Remember internet is a network of networks.
Multicast is for broadcasts where everybody is receiving the same content simultaneously. It doesn't work for what's being discussed here; on-demand playback of individual episodes and movies. That's unicast. Why would Comcast stream the 15th minute of the 4th episode of season 2 of Community to everybody simultaneously, including the guy watching the 6th episode?
You can point to this and tell him or anyone else this is why Net Neutrality is good and not the antithesis of fair competition in an open market.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
"When the free market turns against them"
Actually, that's never happened. There's never been a free global communications market.
Infrastructure, and those running it, are regulated and taxed/subsidized at different levels at different times, markets, and media.
This is exactly right. The Internet is by definition a network of private/public networks. The reason the Internet took off is because all those network operators realized that the benefits they gained from openly interoperating was much greater than the benefits they could leverage from offering a walled garden (AOL anyone).
Now that some private networks are big enough, and have gotten an idea of what people might want to do with a network, they're starting to wall off and charging rent. Comcast might be able to squeeze out some temporary profits, but it will most definitely be temporary. The Internet would collapse into a series of AOLs, innovation will die off, and it'll all be quiet until the concept of an open Internet is revived.
This is a classic case of killing the goose with golden eggs.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Multicast only works as a bandwidth savings device when you're streaming the same content at the same time to multiple devices. I'm not familiar with the Comcast Xfinity service, but to be able to glean any reasonable measure of savings you'd have to watch Xfinity like you do regular TV - shows scheduled at a certain time, not streamed on demand.
Way back when I had ADSL in australia as my internet traffic within the ISPs network didn't count to my quota. The ISP had a bunch of ftp mirrors, a bunch of game servers, and the subscribers ran a bunch of not legitimate at all P2P servers/clients that restricted to within the ISP IPs.
It had nothing to do with the ISP trying to leverage itself into having an edge over content providing competitors. That external traffic was a big part of their costs and so encouraging their users to use their mirrors and so on was good for them.
When I was at uni, AARNet traffic was cheaper than other national traffic which was cheaper than international traffic - in terms of what the university charged the department for their usage. I can't find any docs now of course, but a different university still has a slightly simpler but similar setup: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/its/quotas/internet/definition.html
Again that wasn't the university trying to get content providers to pay them or trying to give an edge to themselves. It was just a reflection of the costs.
Now the US has far lower costs to start with and maybe they are low enough that it really doesn't matter and comcast are just trying to benefit their other business arms. But without knowing some of the vague details I don't think you can just ignore the non-jerk potential reasons.
Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side.
Nope. I've seen the magical compression on Comcast's side and it doesn't come as dust. It usually arrives in big, slow-moving blocks.
This is one element of a much larger campaign. Who better to hit up (than your installed base) than the mobs at FB?
One man with a command of social media can indeed make a difference. The problem is that Netflix shot itself in the foot before, whizzing off their customer base, and they have part of that image to overcome.
My hopes? Somebody listens and makes Comcast become the neutral transport that they're supposed to be. Comcast will fight this tooth and nail; they will NOT roll over easily as they have the same "we own the wires" mentality that the rest of the once public utilities have.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Assuming that to be true (it isn't) then half is still not zero. If you're going to calculate cost as "sum of all fractions of pipe consumed end-to-end", that would be fair and neutral -- if it was done for everyone by the same metric, even it ended up biasing one source over another. (Neutral simply means that everyone has the same rule applied equally - ie: it is equitable - it does NOT mean all providers are equal. Just as in science or in news, equitability and equal standards are FAR more important than equal share.)
Comcast isn't being equal OR equitable. It's making sources you buy from it essentially zero network cost and all other sources much more expensive. It's leveraging the (rather obvious) monopoly it has over its network to create a second, independent monopoly in the completely different field of content delivery. That's not ok. That's actually blatantly illegal. It also knows that in an election year where markets are jittery and unemployment is high, nobody is going to do a damn thing about it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well keep in mind, when people talk about "the free market", they're not always talking about the same thing. It all depends on whose perspective your looking from, and who you think should be "free" in the market. Is a "free market" the market where *customers* are free, in that they are permitted to choose freely between different vendors of different products, based on the quality of those products? Or is a "free market" a market where the *vendors* are free, in that they are permitted to manipulate the market in any way that they're able, including fraud and monopolization?
When Comcast says they want a "free market", they're talking about the second one, where vendors are free.
I have netflix and comcast as well. I went nearly a month unable to use netflix on my ps3, then I switched to use the google DNS ( 8.8.8.8 ) and it suddenly worked flawlessly again.
Comcast has had other flaky reliability issues with their DNS service, but that specific problem of netflix never being able to connect is highly suspect.