Netflix Changes Course, Says It Will 'Never Outgrow' Fight For Net Neutrality (vice.com) 107
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."
ISPs should meter their customers (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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I'd be happy to pay by the GB - no caps, no throttles, no BS. I pay for the rest of my utilities that way.
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I want to say I'm happy to pay by the GB, but then I remember that telco companies used to charge 20 cents for a text message or roughly $1,250,000 per GB. (assuming 140 bytes per message and a 20 byte overhead).
Now I know that's a ridiculous comparison, but if they thought they could get away with charging that much to use unused overhead in their existing lines, I imagine we won't be getting a particularly good deal if they switch to a pay-per-use plan.
If we make them Title II, and regulate their pricing
Re:ISPs should meter their customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you're an idiot. An "unused" GB cannot be stored and sold later. The reason why you pay for "the rest of your utilities" that way is that they have costs associated with the wire, the pipes, etc. and the thing those wires and pipes transport. An unused gallon of water can be stored and sold to someone else, or not "created" in the first place. Treating water costs money. An ISP does not have a GB reservoir that you're using up. An ISP pays no money to replenish the GB they can offer to you. Unused bandwidth is wasted bandwidth. You pay for the bandwidth because that's the only thing that costs money. Every time someone wants to change who gets paid what, you idiots try to scare people into submission by waving this "pay by the GB" scenario over our heads. SHUT THE FUCK UP and return to your cave, trolls.
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The concept is burden, not deprivation.
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Then you're an idiot. An "unused" GB cannot be stored and sold later. The reason why you pay for "the rest of your utilities" that way is that they have costs associated with the wire, the pipes, etc. and the thing those wires and pipes transport. An unused gallon of water can be stored and sold to someone else, or not "created" in the first place.
How do you think hotel rooms and airplane tickets are sold? The customer doesn't care whether you have unused capacity, they care what their price is. Living with unsold capacity is just part of the business model. If you have many off-season rooms/tickets/GBs to sell, make a sale. Long ago on dial-up I used to have an ISP where 11 PM to 7 AM was no charge, that way all the heavy downloading was done at night when few really cared about speed or latency,
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So, you mean like the way commercial power is billed - pay for moment of peak usage?
An ISP does have "a GB reservoir" unless all it's customers hit peak use at the same time (which, admittedly, can happen). If the usage distribution is somewhat random, then your cost really is by GB.
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Peak vs off-peak pricing is a thing, you know.
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I'd be happy to pay by the GB - no caps, no throttles, no BS. I pay for the rest of my utilities that way.
You know what else you would soon not have?
No options.
If all ISPs charged by the GB, you would soon see all of them petitioning and lobbying to do away with SD-quality streams, and all other forms of bandwidth-saving features in order to ensure they "throttle" your wallet every month, with you doing nothing more than using your service. They would strive for this under the guise of a "premium quality internet experience", but we all would know it would be to push for the most bandwidth consumed per custo
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I guess if they want to drive themselves out of business, they'd be free to do so. Other companies would pop up offering more choices, for (initially) cheaper prices, and people would flock to them.
Oh, you mean like cellular companies that "pop up", only to be bought out and collapsed into the collusive environment of mega-corps that dominate all?
That's the problem we face today; as much as we want to convince ourselves that true competition still lives and breathes, the reality is a world full of multi-billion dollar corporations that collude to control the entire fucking market.
Wal-Mart started this trend of moving into a town to destroy small business. Now watch and see how Amazon works to dismant
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No, you don't. Read your utilities bill someday.
Re: ISPs should meter their customers (Score:1)
K, done. You're wrong.
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Caveman interkin3tic need to rest now...
The Sierra Network (TSN) pricing (Score:3)
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
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Netcom didn't...Neither did IBM.com.
In fact I can't think of an _ISP_ that did. Just crappy 'online services' like you list.
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You do realize that most people used those "online services" before there was a widespread web, AND most people didn't have access to Usenet.
So those "online services" were what provided the content (including chat) for people.
(BTW, I'm NOT one of those who used those services, since I started on BBSes before that [mostly non-networked], then a shell account at college.)
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Upthread the year 1995 was mentioned. Only _morons_ were still on Compuserve or AOL in 1995.
I got my first internet account while in explorer scouts (local engineering firm let us), in the early 1980s. Wasn't much there, BBSs were more fun.
Re: The Sierra Network (TSN) pricing (Score:2)
It has been a long, long time. CompuServe, in the early eighties, was billed by the minute? Someone correct me, if my memory is faulty. It was stupidly expensive. Something like 1200 baud at $12/min and $4/min if you dialed into the 900 baud MODEM pool?
And we liked it!
No, not really. It kinda sucked, honestly. Wow... Yeah, I paused for a few minutes to think about this. I don't even have rose colored glasses. It pretty much sucked, especially when compared to today. ASCII porn was a thing.
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Things like Compuserve were way out of my budget. I used an acoustic coupler MODEM (for about a day), on a shared line, with a teenage sister. I became a nocturnal BBS denzin.
ASCII porn only printed right on some printers.
Tell that to kids these days and they won't believe you.
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They don't even know what MODEM means. ;-)
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1995 was used because that was the only information I could find online about the pricing.
Also, I was not able to get dial-up internet in my rural area until 1996. So I used a lot of hobby BBSes and subscribed to things like CompuServe, Delphi, Prodigy and TSN. TSN was rather expensive and my parents eventually got sick of paying for it. Which is a shame because to this day I regret never beating the game Shadow of Yserbius.
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I used to use MichNet a lot, it was free but boring. MichNet was basically a dial-up to a text browser (lynx) and a few other apps through a menu driven interface. The advantage is you didn't need a TCP/IP stack on your computer, so some old KayPro or ADM-3 could still get a person online.
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Hourly is bad though. What if I'm hosting a website that needs to be up 24 hours a day but only consumes 1MB/day in traffic? You shouldn't be charged the same as someone who consumes 1gigabit up/down 24/7. The 1MB/day only requires a fraction of a switch's capacity.
The obvious problem (Score:3)
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
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When the fuck is 28:00?
When does that happen?
Are you one of those primitive species that lives on Earth or something?
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ISPs only need to charge us per bit.
If they charge the same amount, regardless of where that bit came from, then that is network neutrality.
At that point those end users who are clogging up the Internet ...
You are missing the point. The problem is not "users clogging up the internet". The real issue is that ISPs are mostly monopolies and they want to leverage that monopoly to muscle their way into the content business. If they charge differential prices to customers based on where the content comes from, then they can shift users to their own content, and either extort tribute out of Netflix/Amazon/iTune
And that is why NN is inherently stupid and fails (Score:2)
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 unrealisti
What is "bandwidth"?? (Score:2)
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"
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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
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I'm pretty sure the plan is to set a cap, and then zero rate partners.
Netflix probably realized they're fucked if that happens, because people won't blame the ISP for the cap, they'll decide Netflix it too expensive to use, I'm so glad at least Comcast TV doesn't break the budget.
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Re: ISPs should meter their customers (Score:2)
The reality is that there is no technical reason for metering at all and it wouldn't stop these issues either.
The internet infrastructure works whether or not you send bits over it, it doesn't wear out any faster nor does it need any more maintenance because a bit was sent.
What's more is that your ISP doesn't pay per bit sent either, that's pure fiction. The problem is that they don't want to expand their network.
At the peering points they are at 100% capacity and refuse to install more bandwidth even thoug
epsilon = zero (Score:2)
Apparently you have yet to meet our current and future generations of non-volatile memory.
I constantly marvel at how Douglas Adams got everything deeply right, whereas Clifford Stoll, not so much.
When Slide Rules Ruled [uvm.edu] —
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That's the problem, the companies get tax-funded money from FCC and other agencies to expand their networks and then privatize them, we paid for them, we should get them back. Current regulation keeps those schemes in place both on federal and local levels, the access to poles and lines and the expansion of new copper and fiber is so heavily regulated that competitors have a really hard time starting a new business. We need to deregulate the current situation and give back the right of ways to all players i
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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.
What a marvelous idea. And since you leave your always-on connection always-on, for the convenience, you won't mind paying the bill for a 31 day DDoS, right?
Let's say you're subscribing to Comcast's middle tier, which is 100 Mbps. And let's say you're paying $15 per gigabyte, because that's what Verizon charges for overages, and therefore it must be a reasonable price. There are 2678400 seconds in a 31 day month. Let's say Comcast's throttling is very efficient and you actually get right at 100 Mbps. S
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Your numbers and/or units are wrong.
> 33,480,000 bytes
That is only 33.48 megabytes.
But your error is before that.
3600 * 24 * 31 = 2678400 sec/month (that one you got right)
2678400 sec/month * 100,000,000 bits/sec = 267,840,000,000,000 bits/month (you had an error here)
267,840,000,000,000 bits/month / 8 bits/byte = 33,480,000,000,000 bytes/month
33,480,000,000,000 bytes/month / 1,000,000,000 bytes/gigabyte = 33,480 gigabytes/month
33,480 gigabytes/month * 15 $/gigabyte = $502,200
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They should charge the sender of the data. Thus the subscription fees cover the costs. The benefit is that it slows down spam and advertising, and could spur demand for setting up more distributed content servers for better overall access.
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Why not the initiator of the transfer? This is TCP/IP and there is a three-way handshake.
If I HTTP "GET" something, I an the originator of the request. So I only pay for the few lines of text I sent to request the webpage and the server on the other end pays for the file they are sending to me? or does the requester pay for the entire transaction? There are lots of ways to slice this, and I think there are pros and cons to all of the options.
Gatekeepers meet Keymasters (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Because you keep electing crooked politicians who take millions of dollars in bribes from both ISPs and content providers.
Does this ever not describe all of the candidates on the ballot? The only way to get on the ballot to begin with is by having enough money to get on there. And that money comes from corporations. So there are no choices that aren't bought and paid for already. I generally choose the write in option, but I've never voted for anyone who won when I do that either.
Too Late (Score:4, Insightful)
It's about negotiation and money (Score:2)
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
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Seriously, this is a fucking corporation. "Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility." - Ambrose Bierce
If you were confused about what it's "colors" were, it's colored red with the blood of the people they'd harvest kidneys from if they thought they could get away with it and make more money doing it. Much like EVERY FUCKING OTHER SUFFICIENTLY LARGE CORPORATION EVER. This is not shaming Netflix. Netflix is neither good nor bad compar
Re: Too Late (Score:2)
You do know that Linux, FSF, etc. are all corporations, right?
That's a pretty big brush you painted with.
Netflix abusing net neutrality themselves (Score:1)
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 pro
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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?
You could just, maybe, turn off the VPN?
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Congratulations on not understanding the core concept of net neutrality!
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With great arrogance (Score:3)
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I don't see it as an arrogant content, nor as a change of course. He was simply stating the fact that net neutrality isn't about protecting the big players like today's Netflix, it's about protecting the smaller players. And he never said Netflix didn't support net neutrality, only that it wasn't a "narrow" interest as in vital to their bottom line.
A fair-weather friend. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
I think they are in favor of net neutrality because it reduces their costs. At the same time, they have to reassure their stockholders that the lack of net neutrality isn't a threat to their business model. Along the way, if they can get a deal that their competitors don't, this helps them too. Basically, for them it is a business decision. Fighting for net neutrality helps them in both the short term with cost and the long term by protecting their business model but the lack of net neutrality can also
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I call bullshit (Score:2)
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 t
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Netflix was the company that demanded free rack space from ISPs, using some bizarre 'net neutrality' argument to claim they were entitled to it, as they used so much bandwidth otherwise.
They have since cut deals with the majors, a local cache is almost required.
If they just used html5 video the transparent proxies should just cache the video automagically.
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Throttle Washington (Score:5, Insightful)
All they need to do, is throttle the entire Washington area to 256kbs for a few days.
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uh oh (Score:3)
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.
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Or it could just be a misinterpreted (and poorly stated) quote. Net Neutrality ISN'T that essential to Netflix any more for a variety of reason of which size is only one. That doesn't mean they don't support it or think it's important for the WORLD. Besides, the President says far more stupid and dangerous things on a daily basis. We're seeing a new standard in what people with influence will say in public.
Our Pipes (Score:2)
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 sell
Too late (Score:2)
No Evidence of Actual Harm? (Score:1)
Despite all the doom and gloom talk, where's the actual evidence of harm due to Net Neutrality being reversed?
From what I can tell there isn't much evidence out there. Apparently there's so little that people are having to create problems to bring attention to these supposed problems that don't actually exist.
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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 a
They should collective bargain (Score:2)