Netflix On Internet Tolls And Strong Net Neutrality

For a second there, I thought that said "internet trolls," then I realized it's basically the same headline either way.

Without strong net neutrality, big ISPs can demand potentially escalating fees for the interconnection required to deliver high quality service. The big ISPs can make these demands -- driving up costs and prices for everyone else -- because of their market position. For any given U.S. household, there is often only one or two choices for getting high-speed Internet* access and that’s unlikely to change. Furthermore, Internet access is often bundled with other services making it challenging to switch ISPs. It is this lack of consumer choice that leads to the need for strong net neutrality.

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Reed Hastings is a greedy whiner. What he's talking about isn't "net neutrality". He's talking about forcing the ISPs to carry his costs for him. Nobody's blocking Netflix - it is already neutral - but its selfish of him to ask the ISPs to pay for his uplink costs under the thinly veiled disguise of "peering".

I don't believe any of the big ISPs are against peering. As long as the two-way traffic flows are near equal they'd sign up. But that's not even close to what Hastings is asking for.

PigLover said:

Reed Hastings is a greedy whiner. What he's talking about isn't "net neutrality". He's talking about forcing the ISPs to carry his costs for him. Nobody's blocking Netflix - it is already neutral - but its selfish of him to ask the ISPs to pay for his uplink costs under the thinly veiled disguise of "peering".

I don't believe any of the big ISPs are against peering. As long as the two-way traffic flows are near equal they'd sign up. But that's not even close to what Hastings is asking for.

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I already pay Comcast to carry the traffic. I want my rates to drop if providers are going to start paying for it instead.

Steve said:

For a second there, I thought that said "internet trolls," then I realized it's basically the same headline either way.

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Haha I read that the exact same way.

They act like Netflix wants to push this traffic out on their own - it's the ISP subscribers that are using their connection and asking Netflix to send them the data.

It would be like if I rented a post office box, ordered a bunch of stuff through the mail from Amazon and then the shop renting me the post office box goes to Amazon and tells them they need to pay extra because they're sending me so much stuff (that I ordered).

If it's a problem, they should be coming to me and saying - look, you can't get more than 20 packages per month or nothing over 8lbs, etc.

Your analogy is imperfect. Not even close, really.

A more useful way to understand it is this: Lets say you had a friend who uses the same ISP and asked them to stream things to you. Suppose that, in order to do this, your friend needed his ISP service upgraded. Would you expect your ISP to pay for this just because your friend was streaming to you and you already "paid for" your connection? Of course not - that would be silly.

Now lets say that your friend was streaming his content to hundreds of thousands "friends" and needed an uplink to your ISP of 100Gbps or more to do it. Would you still think the ISP should just pay for it because the other end of that connection were already customers? How absurd.

What Mr. Hastings is demanding is no different at all from this, except that he is hiding it in the guise of a small ISP carrying his traffic and then demanding that others "peer" with this ISP at their own cost and for no further compensation.

He is expressing greed. Pure and simple. And by hiding it behind the mantra of "net neutrality'" his is making you believe the ones he would steel from are the villains.

I don't want to get into analogy wars but Netflix uses a provider that is not my ISP.

My ISP should not care whether I'm pulling a 3Mbit stream from Netflix or Steam or Apple or whatever. I pay them to carry my traffic and peer with other providers.

Netflix has their own connection provider and they should be negotiating the appropriate peering agreements and charging Netflix a commensurate rate.

Stop clouding the issue with "my friend" and his hundreds of "friends" - that's not what's happening.

The ISP's customers already paid. If it is not enough, you should consider raising rates ... as if THAT would be something new.

They are seeking, as any sane profit making enterprise would .... to get paid DOUBLE.

I think we should all take a month off from the internet. Let them see what will happen if they piss us off beyond a certain point.

PigLover said:

Your analogy is imperfect. Not even close, really.

A more useful way to understand it is this: Lets say you had a friend who uses the same ISP and asked them to stream things to you. Suppose that, in order to do this, your friend needed his ISP service upgraded. Would you expect your ISP to pay for this just because your friend was streaming to you and you already "paid for" your connection? Of course not - that would be silly.

Now lets say that your friend was streaming his content to hundreds of thousands "friends" and needed an uplink to your ISP of 100Gbps or more to do it. Would you still think the ISP should just pay for it because the other end of that connection were already customers? How absurd.

What Mr. Hastings is demanding is no different at all from this, except that he is hiding it in the guise of a small ISP carrying his traffic and then demanding that others "peer" with this ISP at their own cost and for no further compensation.

He is expressing greed. Pure and simple. And by hiding it behind the mantra of "net neutrality'" his is making you believe the ones he would steel from are the villains.

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Talk about a bad analogy. you are fucked up in yours.

That is NOTHING like what is going on here.

DoubleTap is exactly on par.

Using your attempt. Lets say you and your friend have internet service, your friend wants to stream things to you but they need better internet service. So they upgrade to a business plan and get faster speeds and start paying $100 more per month. Over a few months instead of just you, 20 other friends start downloading from your friend. Your ISP notices that their backbone now is carrying more traffic so they force your friend to pay for them to upgrade every device in their office because they don't want to pay for it. Or lets pull this back one step and put you on two different ISPs like what is going on here. You have AT&T for your internet service, he has Frontier. Again he needs to offer up files to stream so he gets a 1Gbps fiber connection from Frontier. You have 40Mbps from AT&T. Over time a few of your neighbors start to access his files also, all of you having 40Mbps connections. Your friend is fine and normally only uses 50% of his connection max. However AT&T starts to notice that they have the 500 people in your area all using a shared 1Gbps connection and that it is being about 80% utilized. So they throttle traffic from your friend to you down to 100kbps and then send your friend a bill for them to upgrade that link to your neighborhood to 10Gbps with traffic from him to you returned to normal speeds.

What is close to what is going on here. Netflix pays their ISP for a certain connection. Lets say 10Gbps. You pay your ISP for you internet connection. Netflix is not maxing out their connection and having no issues on their end. However somewhere out there in the world between their ISP and your ISP somebody out there is throttling the traffic either by not turning up more connections or just by throttling speed from certain host. There is no issue with Netflix not paying for what they are using. They are paying their ISP and not going over what they are paying for. The issue is between their ISP and the other ISPs. That is not the fault of Netflix. They are not their own ISP, they are not in charge of those trunks. They pay for their service just like you pay for yours. However Comcast, Verizon and the rest are slowing down the speeds until Netflix decides to pay them instead to be their ISP but only for certain customers. So not only do they now have their previous ISP, but Comcast is forcing them to pay to use them as a ISP for any customer that has Comcast and slows down traffic from any other ISP that Netflix would try to use. Verizon forces them to use Verizon as their ISP for Verizon customer and slows down traffic from any other source. That would be on par with you having to not only have your internet service from say AT&T for Uverse for normal traffic. but you would have to get Google fiber if you wanted to access youtube or google to search for sites, and then would have to have facebook as an ISP to access facebook pages, and then would have to HardOCP as an ISP to access this site. And if you tried to use your 1Gbps google connection to access hardocp you would load pages at 12kbps

In a perfect world, if my ISP couldn't deliver my Netflix traffic with appropriate quality, I'd tell them to fuck off and I'd take my business elsewhere.

But since broadband in the USA sucks, I have exactly 1 choice for high speed internet and they've possibly even taken government subsidies to make it happen to this point. It's not like I live in the boonies either, there just simply isn't any competition. I could live 2 blocks away and I'd have 2 or 3 choices.

PigLover said:

Reed Hastings is a greedy whiner. What he's talking about isn't "net neutrality". He's talking about forcing the ISPs to carry his costs for him. Nobody's blocking Netflix - it is already neutral - but its selfish of him to ask the ISPs to pay for his uplink costs under the thinly veiled disguise of "peering".

I don't believe any of the big ISPs are against peering. As long as the two-way traffic flows are near equal they'd sign up. But that's not even close to what Hastings is asking for.

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You work for a cable company or something?

We pay ISP's to carry our data, not Netflix. We pay them, and they want Netflix to pay as well. Every time a new internet service gets too big, should we really expect ISP's to be compensated for doing what they're already paid to do?

We are going to be screwed.. so will netflix ..too much money for things not to be corrupted

Exavior said:

T....

Using your attempt. Lets say you and your friend have internet service, your friend wants to stream things to you but they need better internet service. So they upgrade to a business plan and get faster speeds and start paying $100 more per month. Over a few months instead of just you, 20 other friends start downloading from your friend. Your ISP notices that their backbone now is carrying more traffic so they force your friend to pay for them to upgrade every device in their office because they don't want to pay for it. Or lets pull this back one step and put you on two different ISPs like what is going on here. You have AT&T for your internet service, he has Frontier. Again he needs to offer up files to stream so he gets a 1Gbps fiber connection from Frontier. You have 40Mbps from AT&T. Over time a few of your neighbors start to access his files also, all of you having 40Mbps connections. Your friend is fine and normally only uses 50% of his connection max. However AT&T starts to notice that they have the 500 people in your area all using a shared 1Gbps connection and that it is being about 80% utilized. So they throttle traffic from your friend to you down to 100kbps and then send your friend a bill for them to upgrade that link to your neighborhood to 10Gbps with traffic from him to you returned to normal speeds.

What is close to what is going on here. Netflix pays their ISP for a certain connection. Lets say 10Gbps. You pay your ISP for you internet connection. Netflix is not maxing out their connection and having no issues on their end. However somewhere out there in the world between their ISP and your ISP somebody out there is throttling the traffic either by not turning up more connections or just by throttling speed from certain host. There is no issue with Netflix not paying for what they are using. They are paying their ISP and not going over what they are paying for. The issue is between their ISP and the other ISPs. That is not the fault of Netflix. They are not their own ISP, they are not in charge of those trunks. They pay for their service just like you pay for yours. However Comcast, Verizon and the rest are slowing down the speeds until Netflix decides to pay them instead to be their ISP but only for certain customers. So not only do they now have their previous ISP, but Comcast is forcing them to pay to use them as a ISP for any customer that has Comcast and slows down traffic from any other ISP that Netflix would try to use. Verizon forces them to use Verizon as their ISP for Verizon customer and slows down traffic from any other source. That would be on par with you having to not only have your internet service from say AT&T for Uverse for normal traffic. but you would have to get Google fiber if you wanted to access youtube or google to search for sites, and then would have to have facebook as an ISP to access facebook pages, and then would have to HardOCP as an ISP to access this site. And if you tried to use your 1Gbps google connection to access hardocp you would load pages at 12kbps

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This is my understanding as well; Me---> My ISP ---> ISP of Netflix -->Netflix

I make the request to netflix, I mean google.com does not force their website on my computer, I request it.

To me it seems like Ford trying to get warranteed repair costs from wal-mart because people wore out their cars driving to the store.

And so we sit at this impasse waiting for someone to pay the lawyers enough to drag this to court to set a precedent somewhere...

Exavior said:

Talk about a bad analogy. you are fucked up in yours.

That is NOTHING like what is going on here.

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Really? The ONLY thing that is going on here is exactly as I described. Netflix is using a false-front ISP and having that ISP demand "peering". The traffic flows from that ISP to Comcast are 99+% one-way traffic. The fakey-ISP wants its links to Comcast upgraded to 100Gbps but wants Comcast to pay for almost all of it under a demand for "peering", even though all of the benefit accrues to one party (Netflix's fake ISP).

That is 100% of the story. Reed is greedy. And his claim of "net neutrality" being the issue is a complete lie designed to hide his greed.

Its a shame you've drank his Kool-Aid.

It's all a big scam all around.

Netflix isn't the only company streaming large amounts of traffic, even if they may be the single largest.

Is the ISP under no obligation to invest in its infrastructure to handle changing content delivery demands?

deton8 said:

Is the ISP under no obligation to invest in its infrastructure to handle changing content delivery demands?

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This is essentially what the big ISPs is doing.

ISPs improve their infrastructure to Netflix so that they can collect the fees that Netflix was previously was paying to a third-party.

PigLover said:

Really? The ONLY thing that is going on here is exactly as I described. Netflix is using a false-front ISP and having that ISP demand "peering". The traffic flows from that ISP to Comcast are 99+% one-way traffic. The fakey-ISP wants its links to Comcast upgraded to 100Gbps but wants Comcast to pay for almost all of it under a demand for "peering", even though all of the benefit accrues to one party (Netflix's fake ISP).

That is 100% of the story. Reed is greedy. And his claim of "net neutrality" being the issue is a complete lie designed to hide his greed.

Its a shame you've drank his Kool-Aid.

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Fake ISP? They are using Cogent Communications and in some areas Level 3. How are either of those fake ISPs. They are using the big boys. So no idea where you get your screwed up information for you are very much wrong in your statements.

Netflix uses real ISP, they pay these real ISPs real money. They are a customer in the same way that you or I happen to be to our local ISPs. They just have a better connection. but they still are not responsible for any peering or anything between their ISP and others.

Exavior said:

Fake ISP? They are using Cogent Communications and in some areas Level 3. How are either of those fake ISPs. They are using the big boys. So no idea where you get your screwed up information for you are very much wrong in your statements.

Netflix uses real ISP, they pay these real ISPs real money. They are a customer in the same way that you or I happen to be to our local ISPs. They just have a better connection. but they still are not responsible for any peering or anything between their ISP and others.

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Be careful not to state too much factual information. I swear every time these stories come up, there always has to be ONE that agrees with what Comcast and Verizon is doing and I don't get it.

I mean wtf, do people want tiered internet or something because this is the dangerous slippery slope Comcast and Verizon are coming to. People always wanna defend these providers like they have stock in them. I know this, I pay for 50Mb connection and could NEVER get an HD stream on Netflix. I shit you not as soon as Comcast made Netflix pay them magically my Streams start faster and are in HD and never buffer anymore.

And people want to say Comcast isn't or never throttled...

deton8 said:

Is the ISP under no obligation to invest in its infrastructure to handle changing content delivery demands?

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They ought to be, but somehow get out of it. I mean seriously, if they had to pay for infrastructure to meet the demands of their users, that'd cut into their profits!

Exavior said:

Fake ISP? They are using Cogent Communications and in some areas Level 3. How are either of those fake ISPs. They are using the big boys. So no idea where you get your screwed up information for you are very much wrong in your statements.

Netflix uses real ISP, they pay these real ISPs real money. They are a customer in the same way that you or I happen to be to our local ISPs. They just have a better connection. but they still are not responsible for any peering or anything between their ISP and others.

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Yeah, calling Cogent and Level-3 as false front ISPs for Netflix is actually kinda funny

Neb said:

Yeah, calling Cogent and Level-3 as false front ISPs for Netflix is actually kinda funny

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Either the dude is a troll in which case he is sticking hard to his story so I guess he is doing a good job at his attempt of trolling. So A for effort, D- for execution. Or he misunderstood the comment in the story about Reed trying to prove this was all about money by offering to peer with the other ISPs directly and have their software upload as much back to them as possible to try to balance out the uploads and downloads for free peering. And instead of realizing that isn't what they are doing but is something that Reed offered to the ISPs just to show that they could care less about an equal amount of data in both directions he actually thinks that is what they are doing right now.