Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Brett Glass nanog at brettglass.com
Sun Jul 13 23:00:46 UTC 2014


At 10:25 AM 7/13/2014, Charles Gucker wrote:
 
>ALL ISPs are in the business of providing access to
>the Internet.    If you feel the need to rebel, then I suggest you
>look at creative ways to increase revenue from your customers, 

My customers do not want me to "creatively" find ways to extract
additional money from them so as to cover expenses that Netflix
should be covering. Nor do they want me to subsidize Netflix
subscribers from the fees from non-Netflix subscribers. They
want to pay a fair price for their Internet that does not include
paying ransom to third parties.

We currently provide that: we guarantee each subscriber a certain 
minimum capacity  to the Internet exchange at 1850 Pearl Street 
in Denver (to which Netflix does not directly connect) with a certain 
maximum duty cycle. But we can't guarantee the performance of a specific
third party service such as Netflix. If Netflix wants us to do that, 
it is going to have to pay us, as it pays Comcast. That's only fair,
because we would be doing something special just for it -- something
which costs money.

If Netflix tries to use its market power to harm ISPs, or to smear
us via nasty on-screen messages as it has been smearing Verizon, ISPs have
no choice but to react. One way we could do this -- and I'm strongly
considering it -- is to start up a competing streaming service that
IS friendly to ISPs. It would use the minimum possible amount of
bandwidth, make proper use of caching, and -- most importantly --
actually PAY Internet service providers, instead of sapping their
resources, by allowing them to sell it and keep a portion of the fee.
This would provide an automatic, direct, per-customer reimbursement
to the ISP for the cost of bandwidth. ISPs would sign on so fast
that such a service could BURY Netflix in short order.

--Brett Glass




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