COVID-19 vs. peering wars

Sun Apr 5 13:52:34 UTC 2020

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020, at 20:31, Matthew Petach wrote:
> Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, Hulu, and other video
> streaming services cut their bit rates down?
> 
> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51968302
> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/netflix-and-youtube-cut-streaming-quality-in-europe-to-handle-pandemic/
> 
> It seems that perhaps the fingers, and the regulatory
> hammer, are being pointed in the wrong direction at

There was not regulation for that.
There were some politicians crying out and loud in the media that streaming platforms should reduce bit-rates. Netflix took the opportunity to try (sooner than initially scheduled) new compression schemes/algorithms on their platform. Further, they took the opportunity to say "everything is OK, the new stuff will be deployed full-scale around Europe". In parallel, other streaming platforms took their measures, some of them as simple as "default is one level lower" (720p instead of 1080p, or even 480p instead of 720p). That went as far as platforms that would never be named explicitly by any "responsible" politician (like pornhub and sorts).
Chances are the results of the "bitrate reduction" will end up in the US pretty soon. Netflix are also insisting on the fact that it's not a quality reduction, just new compression allowing for lower bitrates over the wire.

The French regulator is even very decent in this respect, the official message being : "situation is overall good, in the rare cases and places where there are issues operators will do heir job to fix the issues".

In general, there are no new issues, just probably more people realising the issues that already existed for some time.

Peering-wise, BAU, nothing new. Only thing is one of the 4 majors ISPs, ~21% market share, over 98% IPv6 deployment on fixed (and 0% on mobile) mono-homed to Cogent and de-peering HE. They are not peering as a general rule.