Ah Comcast⌠Here with another helpful reminder that the distinction between âlawful evilâ and the other kinds really breaks down once you reach the point where âlawfulâ is a mutable concept within your grasp.
Hey Netflix! We canât hear you with Comcastâs #$% in your mouth Could you please take it out so we can hear you?
Cory, when you write âInsert sound of record scratchingâ, a lot of people here 30 years or younger looks like a blank.
On the other hand, a lot of people over 50 probably have no idea what is meant by net neutrality, so I guess it all evens itself out.
Useless comment over. Interesting read Cory. Keep up the good work in sticking it to âthe manâ.
Smart people gullible.
Off-topic, but records are actually seeing a big revival:
Simultaneously, thereâs been a drop-off in cable TV subscriptions.
Every time I see these articles I am so thankful I dodged that bullet when I discovered my new house was already wired for FiOS. I had Comcast all scheduled to come out despite their bait-and-switch sales, outright lying, and ignoring my desires to push packages on me that met none of my requirements. Because they are literally the only other option here.
Why not lie? In our modern corpophilic culture, there are no consequences for lies. If youâre big enough, there are no consequences for pretty much anything. Even if he only convinces a couple of percent of the public that Comcast is the good guy, he gets it for free so why not?
Comcast is the last company in the world that I want to defend, but the Comcast-Netflix story has been very poorly reported in the media (including here).
This isnât a net neutrality issue, itâs a peering issue between Comcast and one of the bandwidth providers (Cogent?) that Netflix uses.
In the end, this arrangement will give better service to customers and cut Netflixâs bandwidth costs. The loser here is Cogent.
Where I lived, it was between them and Brighthouse, so I went with Brighthouse. Which seemed okay to meânever noticed anything amiss, but I also didnât look deeply. Just canceled that account in preparation for a move, and the weird thing was that the customer representative told me, probably five times over, that once I get to wherever Iâm going, to please call them if I should have ANY questions. I donât plan to call them when I have trouble figuring out the mix ratio for brownies, but it did seem weird in a 
Please, please donât go sort of way.
If theyâre bound by an FCC agreement to remain neutral, then what are the consequences when they breach that agreement? Nothing? Because they broke the agreement for three solid months, then brokered a bribe from Netflix. So much rage.
AND! Cory didnât write this either 
It was Chris Morran.
Cory didnât write that part, itâs from the source.
You know, if it werenât for the DRM, this could be handled a lot more efficiently. Transparent packet caching is a real thing and it works, but not when youâve heavily encrypted everything. ISPs should be complaining to media providers that the DRM is killing them, ironically those two companies are one in the same thanks to our screwed up vertically integrated media landscape.
Yes, Netflix uses a lot of bandwidth. It also pays for that bandwidth. Itâs being recieved by people who also paid for their bandwidth from companies that took $360 billion in government assistance to upgrade their networks, and then just pocketed it. And now theyâre complaining that they donât have the capacity to handle todayâs network demands and want everybody to pay the more money. Note that theyâre not promising better service or anything, they just want more money.
Netflix is only a bad guy in that it exposed just how much the ISPs have been ripping off the public for years now.
Your argument about everybody has paid for their bandwidth and Comcast wants to double-dip isnât quite correct.
The end user buys bandwidth from Comcast. Netflix buys bandwidth from a bunch of different people, including Cogent. Cogent had a peering agreement with Comcast that allowed them to send a certain amount of traffic into Comcast for some fee (or perhaps for free if the agreement was for balanced traffic). Because Netflix traffic is almost entirely one-way, Cogent was operating outside of the agreement with Comcast so Comcast did what their agreement says they can do - demand money from Cogent. Cogent didnât want to pay and so Comcast did the other thing their agreement allows - throttle.
Customers complained loudly and so Comcast and Netflix made a deal for Netflix to peer directly with Comcast. This saves Netflix money and gives a better experience to customers.
Netflix always had the option of using a different network. Comcast customers who watched Netflix on their Apple TV devices never experienced this problem because (for some reason) Netflix sends Apple TV streams over Level 3 and Level 3 was operating within their agreement with Comcast.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality.
If the end user were to download 24-7, they would eventually hit their data cap and Comcast will throttle the connection. Would you call that a net neutrality problem?
Really?
So thereâs nothing wrong here because:
Both of these arguments do not adress whether this is a net neutrality issue, yet they are central to the argument here, and its a slippery slope type argument which continues with:
You mean, RESTORE your Netflix experience to what it was before throttling by the ISP. If I was to smash a cup handle and I fix it with some crazy glue, or maybe I just buy a new one, I am not improving it. Thatâs not the commonly accepted meaning of the word improvement.
And then the non sequitur:
How is Netflix trying to pull a fast one?, Iâm open to discussing this, but the âarticleâ (propaganda piece on Mashable) does not say, it says words, sure, but none that back up the argument directly rather than handwaving it away.
(This peering issue you mention is, again, only mentioned in the âarticleâ (astroturfing linkbait), I have a good grasp of the technical issues it refers to yet none of these are mentioned here as anything other than technobabble so not worth discussing as part of the argument either.
There may be something here but its really not as simple as the way its stated here, Iâm reminded of this: How to Cook for Forty Humans - Wikisimpsons, the Simpsons Wiki 
)
But the funny thing is that the real âmeatâ of the argument is hidden here in this paragraph, it just doesnât mean what you say it means:
So, investors were told that everythingâs fine so they donât worry and take their money with them. And this doesnât raise an alarm for you? The argument basically boils down to:
Its not a net neutrality issue because WE SAY ITS NOT A NET NEUTRALITY ISSUE AND NOBODY HAS THE AUTHORITY TO SAY IT IS, LETS WORRY ABOUT THAT IN THE FUTURE.
But if it isnât, then why had the FCC attempted to prevent this from happening in the past?, and the minute the FCCâs power to regulate this was overruled. Throttling starts?
Yes, yes it is. For business it is.
Seems to me that what they do says quite a bit more then the spin they try to put on it. Because this is spin, its the language of business and politics du jour after all.
There is something to that argument, but really, the biggest problem here is competition, and how this makes the playing field uneven.
I mean, if the money a subscriber pays Comcast is not enough for the use the subscriber needs, then shouldnât Comcast just hike up the price? Not if they can double dip.
This is really just a version of the app store model for ISPâs, where the ISP wants a cut of everything thatâs sold through it.
Netflix released their traffic data for 2013, which showed the nosedive at both Verizon and Comcast, yet this dude you replied to claims this was Cogentâs fault. No, not unless Netflix just started peering through Cogent for only those two ISPs in November and stopped in February. Iâm a crapcast customer who witnessed the drop in Netflix streaming quality first hand. It was occassionally spotty in November and December, but less than a week after the courts struck down the FCCâs net neutrality rule, Netflix became unwatchable. Nothing would stream higher than standard definition, whereas the week prior, damned near everything was streaming at 1080 or better.
You seem to be starting by saying itâs not an issue of double dipping, and then go on to describe something that is quite explicitly double dipping, but itâs totes ok no really.
Iâm not sure if you just donât understand the words people are using here or if you are being intentionally disingenuous.
Considering you also keep claiming that itâs not a net neutrality issue immediately before and after describing how it is a net neutrality issue, Iâm assuming its the second.
They are charging their customers money to provide them access to various chunks of the internet, and then charging those various chunks of the internet for being accessed by their customers. In what possible way is this NOT double-dipping?
This is all about peering.
First, you can see what it takes to be a full peer with Comcast here: http://www.comcast.com/peering.
Every entity on the internet has to pay somebody for their bandwidth (assuming the traffic is transiting outside of that entityâs network). If two parties are exchanging similar amounts of data, then they will normally enter into a settlement-free relationship (no money is exchanged). If the traffic is unbalanced, then money is exchanged.
Netflix buys bandwidth in lots of different ways. Previously, they were sending data to Comcast mostly via Cogent. Because the agreement Comcast and Cogent had didnât cover the massive imbalance, Comcast throttled all Cogent traffic (of which Netflix was the biggest percentage by far). Netflix wanted to put one of their servers in the Comcast NOC to avoid this problem, but Comcast wouldnât go for it. Instead, Netflix entered a peering arrangement with Comcast directly (ie not via a third party like Cogent). This benefits Comcast because the traffic imbalance is being paid for and benefits Netflix because they are paying Comcast less than they had to pay Cogent.
If Comcast had been targeting Netflix, then they would have also slowed down Netflix streams coming from other (Level 3) backbones, but they didnât. If a Comcast customer watched Netflix on an AppleTV, it worked beautifully.
This is better for Comcast, better for Netflix, and better for Netflix customers. The loser is Cogent.
