Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Fri Jul 11 15:54:37 UTC 2014

On Fri, 11 Jul 2014 11:38:03 -0400
  Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> Ahad Aboss wrote:
>> Interesting point.
>>
>> The truth is, the ISP is responsible for the quality of experience 
>>for their
>> end customers regardless of what content the customers consume or 
>>what time
>> they consume it. They pay  a monthly subscription / access fee and 
>>that is
>> where it stops. ISPs can chose to blame Netflix until the cows come 
>>home or
>> alternatively, they can do something more constructive, like 
>>deploying a
>> cache solution or establishing  direct peering with Netflix in one 
>>of the
>> POIs.
>>
> 
> Well... if you make a phone call to a rural area, or a 3rd world 
>country, with a horrible system, is it your telco's responsibility to 
>go out there and fix it?
> 
> One might answer, "of course not."  It's a legitimate position, and 
>by this argument, Netflix should be paying for bigger pipes.
> 
>SNIP...

Of course it is not my telco's responsibility to fix the other telco's 
network. But you analogy is not valid here.

Lets change it up a little bit to be more in line with the issue at 
hand.

You make a phone call to a rural carrier or another country and get a 
horrible connection. If that degradation takes place on the link, that 
your telco owns, where it is handed off to the next network, then yes, 
it IS the originating telco's responsibility to pay to have it fixed.

The same goes for the Verizon/Netflix issue. The problem is at the 
edge where Verizon connects to the rest of the internet. They are 
deliberately letting those links become congested to degrade Netflix, 
and any other provider, in order to protect their own video revenue 
stream. They could care less about the customer experience as long as 
they can blame someone else and keep the money flowing and add 
additional revenue by pissing off said Netflix customer enough that 
they move to a Verizon solution.

Robert