Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Mon Jul 14 02:08:12 UTC 2014

----- Original Message -----
> From: nanog at brettglass.com

> This is Brett Glass; I have been alerted to some of the responses to my
> message (which was cross-posted by a third party) and have temporarily
> joined the list to chime in. The following is my response to his
> message, edited slightly to include some new information.

Well, they were actually responses to *my* message, which made a
fundamental point which you carefully don't address here at all, amongst
what our British counterparts would probably term your whinging. :-)

> If Netflix were a good citizen, it would (a) let ISPs cache content;
> (b) pay them
> equitably for direct connections (smaller and more remote ISPs have
> higher costs
> per customer and should get MORE per account than Comcast, rather than
> receiving
> nothing); and (c) work with ISPs to develop updated technology that
> makes streaming
> more efficient. Bandwidth is expensive, and unicast streaming without
> caching is by
> far the most inefficient conceivable way of delivering "fat" content
> to the consumer.

Bandwidth is expensive.  Given.

You made the wrong gamble on how asymmetrical your customers connections
would *really* be.  But that doesn't make that traffic *not be* -- as your
brothers in the telco arm would phrase it -- "at your customers' instance",
rather than, as your arguments all assume, at Netflix's.

About 80% of so of the responses I've seen here agree that's a reasonable
view of the situation... so we'll for the moment assume that you didn't 
address it because you *can't* address it.

Care to differ?

Cheers,
-- jra

[ As you might imagine, this is a bit of a hobby horse for me; Verizon's 
behavior about municipally owned fiber, and it's attempts to convert post-
Sandy customers in NYS from regulated copper to unregulated FiOS service
leave a pretty bad taste in my mouth about VZN. ]
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates       http://www.bcp38.info          2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA      BCP38: Ask For It By Name!           +1 727 647 1274