Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Fri Jul 11 21:01:57 UTC 2014

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Blake Hudson <blake at ispn.net> wrote:
>
> joel jaeggli wrote the following on 7/11/2014 1:39 PM:
>
>> CDN's choose which exit the use all the time, it's kinda the raison de
>> etré.

they do this with DNS changes for client requests... pushing a
customer to an endpoint reachable across one path vs another. (added
for clarification only)

>> If a pop has 174 3356 2914 7992 transit(s) chances are they can use any
>> one of them or all of them to get to foo other large transit as.
>>
> Yes, but no matter which network Netflix uses as an exit from their network,
> Verizon still has the final say on how it enters Verizon's network. If

not really? verizon's held (for relationships they call 'settlement
free interconnects') to a standard that includes essentially equal
announcements across all common interconnects. Ideally this means vzb
announces all 10,123 routes across all of the interconnects between
701 and network B...

> Netflix has several transit providers to choose from, at best they can try
> each one and see what delivers the best experience to their mutual

yup, netflix has some idea that "At time T path X-Y-Z-701 is better
than A-B-C-701" so they force some set of customers across this path
as best they can by telling these customers taht
X-Y-Z-701.stream.netflix.net == 1.2.3.4 is the right name/address
mapping for the content requested.

If something happens during the dns TTL / decision process to change
DNS with traffic across the X-Y-Z-701 path though... it's not clear to
me that netflix can affect those active streams. If the pathway goes
away sure things shift around, if the path just gets congested...
whoops.

On top of this, there are lots of folk over the peering-wars-years
that have shown they can influence peering discussions one way or the
other by pushing traffic across distinct points in the as graph, then
making press-hay about the mistreatment they are receiving.

(NOTE NOTE NOTE: I have no idea if that's going on, I'm just making
the point that this very clearly has happened in the past with other
players)

> customers. Of course, Verizon might change their routing policy tomorrow (or
> on-demand) and throw that all out of whack. My point is that Verizon
> advertises several ways to reach Verizon's network. If one path is
> 'inneficient' as Verizon states, Verizon is at fault for announcing that
> inefficient path. Netflix does not dictate Verizon's border routing policy,
> contrary to Verizon's claims.

it's not the inefficiency of the path, it's the (probably, maybe)
difference in capacity available vs other/alternate paths.

-chris