Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Fri Jul 11 15:22:06 UTC 2014

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.

Ahad

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Vitkovský Adam
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2014 6:33 PM
To: Matthew Petach
Cc: NANOG
Subject: RE: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

> -----Original Message-----
> From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Matthew
> Petach
> Sent: Friday, July 11, 2014 3:35 AM
>
>
> So, if Netflix had to pay additional money to get direct links to
> Verizon, you'd be OK paying an additional 50cents/month to cover those
> additional costs, right?  And when Time Warner also wants Netflix to
> pay for direct connections, you'd be ok paying an additional
> 50cents/month to cover those costs as well, right?  And another
> 50cents/month for the direct connections to Sprint?  And another
> 50cents/month for the direct connections to cablevision?  (repeat for
> whatever top list of eyeball networks you want to reference).
>
> At what point do you draw the line and say "wait a minute, this model
> isn't scalable; if every eyeball network charges netflix to connect
> directly to them, my Netflix bill is going to be $70/month instead of
> $7/month, and I'm going to end up cancelling my subscription to them."
>
>
> Matt

I disagree as all of this makes perfect sense.

Would it be right if Netflix comes to You and says we see you've got a lot
of our customers hooked up to your backbone so to serve better service we'd
like to connect to your network directly.
And you goes: so you would like to become our customer? Sure this is the
monthly fee for the link and transport service that would suite your needs.
And Netflix goes: well how about you build the link to us bearing all the
costs and you gonna charge us nothing for the transport you provide, deal?
What would be your answer?

Of course this "good deal" has some precursors.
If your customers fail to obey your statistical multiplexing predictions and
links to your upstreams are running hot than you have several options.
a) You could pay for the upgrades of links to your upstreams.
b) You could take the "good deal" Netflix has proposed to save costs for a).
c) You could not give a damn about your customers as they have nowhere else
to go anyways and use this advantage to force Netflix to become your
customer (well paying customer as they would need big pipes).
What would you do?

Options a) and b) assumes of course that Netflix has good connections to
their upstreams and not misusing their position into forcing the customer
relationship into free peering one.

adam