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Netflix Changes Course, Says It Will 'Never Outgrow' Fight For Net Neutrality (vice.com)
After a few months of wishy-washy statements on net neutrality indicating that the company had largely given up on it, Netflix is changing course. From a report: On July 12, the video streaming company will join Amazon, Reddit, Pornhub, Imgur, and more to incorporate slowed-down or disrupted service to raise awareness for the importance of strong net neutrality guidelines, giving visitors to its site a taste of what a future without a free and open internet could look like. The protest, organized by Fight for the Future, freepress, and Demand Progress, takes place five days before the first deadline for comments on the FCC's proposal to roll back net neutrality protections. The change in heart comes days after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said, "[Net neutrality is] not narrowly important to us because we're big enough to get the deals we want."
Instead of trying to parasitically extract money from an arbitrary list of content providers, ISPs only need to charge us per bit. At that point those end users who are clogging up the Internet with UHD video traffic from Netflix & friends can pay a proportionally larger amount than people who read a blog and watch a few SD clips on YouTube.
Of course ISPs are too chicken to meter their customers after having made all these promises of "unlimited" service. And as a customer, I certainly wouldn't want to be metered. But if ISPs want to maximize their profits and charge people to support the infrastructure that is being used then end user metering is the obvious way. (and perfectly legal)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Why do we allow those who control the pipes also have their own content?
This creates a huge conflict of interest in promoting the use of their content over someone like NF.
Rates for the service I used, as of 1995 were as follows:
Welcome Plan: 5 hours for $9.95, $2.95 each additional hour
10 Plan: 10 hours for $19.95, $2.75 each additional hour
15 Plan: 15 hours for $29.95, $2.50 each additional hour
25 Plan: 25 hours for $49.95, $2.25 each additional hour
50 Plan: 50 hours for $99.95, $1.95 each additional hour
Unlimited Plan: for $129.95
And this was for dial-up at 2400 bps (and possibly 9600?) ref
Back to my original post, it might be inconvenient to do hourly rates for an always-on broadband, so metering is a natural choice.
Also if someone uses your WiFi, you're stuck with a huge bill that you probably deserve for not securing your WiFi network.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's too late. You've already shown your true colors, this is just pandering to keep customers.
Have you ever tried to watch netflix from a subnet they do not recognize? Like if you acquire some obscure /22 from a defunct military contractor and decide to use that for your company's internal IP space and then decide to watch Netflix while VPN'd? I have. Which led to a rabbit hole of contacting Netflix "research labs" providing them your BGP ASN, having to coordinate with your upstream provider to show proof of announcement and THEN Netflix will allow you to stream.
Of course if you use the major providers, they have already done this for you. Just another nail in the coffin for the small or self-run business IT
When they're too big to care, they're never to big to fall. In fact, the CEO's arrogant comment would have been enough to drive some people away. Netflix no longer brings out the best new content. Iron Fist, the last season of House of Cards, are examples of traditional TV style weak programming full of filler scenes that are boring, where they don't care as they think you're hooked without any options.
The obvious problem with this is that sending bits is not what costs ISPs money. What costs money is having a high-enough bandwidth connection to the backbone during *peak traffic* time. Your ISP is and should be much happier if you download at 4am.
Ideally, you would pay for a certain small guaranteed bandwidth, which you get at all times, including during peak loads (this is kinda far in the future, but ISPs could use SIBRA bandwidth reservations or similar systems). Additionally, you get "up to X" amount of bandwidth at off-peak times. Your ISP should publish how high this "up to X" is on average during each hour of the day, so that you get a realistic idea of what to expect. To make the most efficient use of the infrastructure, during low use time, X should only be limited by the physical limitations of the network -- i.e. if you have a 1 GBit/s connection, they should give you 1 GBit/s even if your peak load guarantee is only for 20 MBit/s.
That's the most efficient way to utilize the network.
I could be wrong but it seems like Netflix only a proponent of network neutrality when it suits them. I suspect they have recently gotten notice that they are being throttled in some locations and they don't like the proposed contract, so they are back on the net neutrality bandwagon. Once they establish long term contracts with major ISPs, they'll be back to their old anti-competitive ways.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Netflix was the company who paid the ISPs so they wouldn't throttle them. For years.
Netflix is the other part of the net neutrality violators: the one that pays the money for preferred treatment of packets.
The ISPs are the sellers of this.
Violation of net neutrality cannot happen without both, and netflix being as big as it is, and being the first guys who paifd, made sure that violation of net neutrality will forever be thought of as a great business move by all ISPs.
So netflix is slightly less evil than the ISPs which basically shook down netflix, but still very very evil.
All they need to do, is throttle the entire Washington area to 256kbs for a few days.
46137
If they charge the same amount, regardless of where that bit came from, then that is network neutrality.
If that is NN, then NN is stupid and should be banned.
Because the implication of what you are saying, is that an ISP cannot charge me less for cached data.
If a provider caches Apple device updates for example, why would it be so wrong for them to charge me less, or not count bandwidth used for updates against my cap??? Yet you are saying that is wrong, simply because your idea of a bit is some unrealistic platonic ideal, when there are many reasons why a bit may cost a different amount in real life from one source vs. another even if you are talking strictly transport costs.
Here's the fundamental disconnect you are engaged in; real people DO NOT WANT bits to cost the same regardless of source. In fact they VERY BADLY do not want that. You are fighting the world on this in an effort that I dare say is even a stupider push against the world and human nature than the War On Drugs. You are that clueless FBI agent on the TV screen arguing how MJ will kill anyone who thinks about it, only your "drug" you are battling is realistic data fees...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hastings must be figuring that Comcast, Charter et al. might try to squeeze him for peering costs. High flying CEO types don't make public about faces like this on a whim.... this is a pocket book issue.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
you've made enemies of both sides.
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It's too late. You've already shown your true colors, this is just pandering to keep customers.
No, this is about BATNA.
Netflix is big enough that they can get the deals they want, generally. But any negotiation is shaped in part by each side's BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement). Net Neutrality gives Netflix a better BATNA. This lets them get a better deal. And that saves them money. Which helps their bottom line at the expense of Telecom's bottom line.
What's more, mature competitors to Netflix (Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple, and even individual streaming channels like HBO) are big enough that killing net neutrality is unlikely to drive them out of the market.
Real lawyers write in C++
These big corporations that are in favor of Net Neutrality should form an entity that negotiates with carriers as a collective. There would be details to vary per corporate member to be sure, but they could have some overarching terms of business that carry very serious weight. Such a collective could potentially purchase bandwidth to be ensured net-neutral to consumers that then purchase it from them.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Despite all the doom and gloom talk, where's the actual evidence of harm due to Net Neutrality being reversed?
The actual harm is being hidden from view in private contracts, the terms of which you are not privy to. What we do know is that Netflix has already paid a shakedown fee to Comcast, and we can guess that it was millions of dollars. That's an enormous amount of harm to anyone who might attempt to compete with Netflix while offering the same type of service.
The potential harm is even worse. Every popular Internet service was unpopular, once. Allowing popular services to squeeze out any new services with arbitrary rent-seeking fees would do fantastic harm to the Internet and to world economies.
an ISP cannot charge me less for cached data.
Correct. ISPs can save money with caching, and they can pass those savings on in aggregate to their customers. But they should not be allowed to differentially charge less for cached data, since that is open to obvious abuse. They will cache their own content, refuse to cache independent content, and then use monopoly power to push their own content, or extort money from other content producers as a "caching fee".
real people DO NOT WANT bits to cost the same regardless of source
People that understand the issues certainly do. Consumers are not "demanding" to pay extra for uncached content. That is bullcrap.
Apparently you have yet to meet our current and future generations of non-volatile memory.
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Speak for yourself, shill. Intelligent real people want to pay for bandwidth
I am speaking for humanity, it is young a handful of techno-snobs that are speaking for yourselves...
What is this "bandwidth" you are paying for? Is it bandwidth to the farthest reaches of McMurdo base in the antarctic? Is it just to your local ISP?
Until you understand there are different KINDS of "bandwidth" you cannot understand how being able to charge a differential for different kinds of bandwidth use means your "bandwidth" can cost less that it does for people who demand "bandwidth" in aggregate to all possible destinations.
As soon as you bet against people wanting to save money, as soon as you bet against people WITHOUT CONTRADICTION also wanting to pay more for VIP access to preferred services, you lose every time.
P.S. As a big old clue-stick, my own home WiFi routers allow me to set preferred devices for traffic priority. If you speak for "everyone" why would a WiFi router for consumers possibly want to let them say an AppleTV running Netflix should take priority over someone browsing Wikipedia? Could it be MOST consumers DO NOT WANT all traffic to be treated equally, at any level???
I would think geeks of all people would understand this fundamental need, but it seems there are a lot of half-techs about these days.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The source of all of this is the back-room, corner-office rants of Comcast, AT&T, Charter and other carriers that Google, Amazon, Uber and Netflix have made billions over their pipes. It's the same thing that if the mafia boss hadn't been scaring off the petty thieves from robbing your store, you wouldn't be successful today, so pay up the protection racket and be happy with it. I suppose building out an internet from backbone to last mile is a thankless, un-sexy job compared to making movies and selling stuff. Why shouldn't they get a piece of that action? I'm sure major Activest Investors are pressuring CEO's with that question all the time. Comcast, at least, put the question a little bit to bed by buying NBC/Universal and becoming content-creators themselves.
But Net Neutrality will never be quite as simple as common-carrier was with the plain-old telephone system (POTS). No, Comcast shouldn't be able to extort more money out of Netflix, even though Netflix may be the service that's choking up their antiquated lines somewhere, generating complaints and forcing them to pay for upgrades in a region they weren't planning to upgrade for a while. But what about E911? or catastrophe alerts? Should that get prioritized? What about when surgeons start running robots on the operating table over the internet... should they get the opportunity to arrange for a near-real-time point-to-point pipe? Wall Street will pay big bucks for that kind of throughput, if that means they can robo-trade just one nano-second ahead of their competitors.
These are policy questions that need smart, thoughtful far-sighted people to work out in a way that benefits everyone in the right way. But our current political climate is a lot of shouting, short-sighted fake-news FUD, coupled with I'm-just-looking-out-for-me bullshit. So, I'm not holding my breath for any resolution soon. "Net Neutrality" will keep coming up, generate a lot of shouting, followed by confused looks, and then out-and-out falsehoods on Fox and Friends:
what is this "neutrality" anyway? isn't this just a way to shut down the bloggers? this is a free country, I have strong opinions and I shouldn't be forced to be "neutral" on the Internet if I don't want to be...
whereupon Net Neutrality will go dormant for a month or two before another big tech CEO brings it back up again.
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