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Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

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Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#331

Post by Terretta »

josh2600 wrote: post #54
Arjuna wrote: post #46

Awesome response to the C&D, via spokesman Jonathan Friedland: "This is about consumers not getting what they paid for from their broadband provider. We are trying to provide more transparency, just like we do with the ISP Speed Index, and Verizon is trying to shut down that discussion."

Playing Devil's advocate here for a second: If Netflix is 35% of global internet traffic at peak capacity (as per the Akamai CEO's comments at a number of events), is it really fair to treat them like every other company? That is to say, if Netflix is really the sole driver of Network upgrades, why does Verizon have to subsidize their costs of business? I'm not taking the stance that this is correct, only querying as…

Why add a viewpoint that is not valid? That's like saying climate change deniers have a “valid” viewpoint when you can find 3 crackpots in a sea of 100,000 scientists.

You buy an Internet connection from an Internet service provider to consume the Internet. Until the word Internet is dropped from “ISP”, that's the service they sell.

They have no more rationale to charge Netflix to “access” Internet service purchasers than they have to charge your grandmother to deliver you her email.

And about that profit motive, cable already raises prices at 4x consumer price inflation:

“Since the FCC began compiling these reports 19 years ago, the cost of basic, expanded basic and the next-most-popular tier of service have risen at average annual clips of 4.3 percent, 6.1 percent and 5.1 percent, respectively. Inflation has grown at an average annual pace of just 2.4 percent over that time period.”

http://www.siliconbeat.com/2014/05/19/pay-tv-prices-continue...

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#332

Post by hga »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #291
notdonspaulding wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education, Police, Fire, Healthcare do not have natural monopolies. Still a good list to have around so we can argue about where the line should be drawn. Kudos!

I'd definitely argue that Police and Fire have natural monopolies. It's definitely more efficient for one agency to manage the entire police force for a city, rather than having multiple. Imagine having cops from 5 different services go out to one call, possibly mistaking the others for an armed civilian. You can see where that would lead, given how trigger happy some cops are already. Imagine 5 different fire trucks…

However both police and firemen already deal with those issues, especially at the edges of cities. E.g. where I live, at the edge of two, police from both regularly handle incidents.

Firemen are even more heterogeneous, in that they have arrangements for big fires and catastrophes like tornadoes where adjacent units come to help. After my city got hit by an EF-5 tornado, as I was exiting my trashed apartment complex, there were fire units varying from a small Indian tribe that's right across a state border from us (and the city e.g. treats the sewage of their casino) to one 40 miles away. Next day, the markings on my apartment door were from a fire unit the came from 160 miles away.

What is needed is something like unity of command/hierarchy. Having two or more units responsible for the same territory leads to the sorts of problems you cite, e.g. a friend told me the NYC city police and subway police once got into a big firefight. This would have been in the '70s or earlier, now they've been unified.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#333

Post by hga »

cookiecaper wrote: post #315
TeMPOraL wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things that work better when they are socialized than when they are privatized. Like healthcare.

Health care only works "better" when socialized if you believe that health care really should be so expensive that they have to print extra money explicitly to pay for it. There's no reason that has to be an integral property of health care. Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable). The reason things cost so much…

"Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable)."

However people are not willing to accept the consequences of hospitals that can't surge in catastrophes. When an EF-5 tornado hit my city 3 years ago, it took out one of our two hospital complexes. Things got ... rather intense at the other (http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-...) but it being big, and stocked with otherwise excess inventory of all sorts of things, kept the death toll at ~160 instead of a likely 1,000 or so.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#334

Post by thearn4 »

Crito wrote: post #279
joezydeco wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of us had to bluff our way through the first gatekeeper on tech support like this? Tech: "Could you please unplug your computer for 20 seconds and restart it?" Me: "Okay. . Okay, it's back" Or this gem? Tech: "What browser are you using?" Me: " Internet Explorer 6".

I had a fun time with a Comcast installation tech a year or two ago: Tech: "Looks like we're about done. Now I just need to use your computer to activate the connection." Me: "I don't have a computer, I only use my internet for tablets and my roku" Tech: "I need to use your computer to activate your connection..." Me: "I don't have a computer, and of course you do not." Tech: "Okay, just a second, I have to make a ca…

Wait, Comcast tries to install software on your own computer without asking?

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#335

Post by alok-g »

Omniusaspirer wrote: post #324
dclowd9901 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your last point, the problem with a subscription service (any subscription service) is that the more it's used, the less its profit margins. A company that is subscription based actually has an interest in their customers using the service as little as possible . It's completely backward (see: gyms, insurance, etc.) The only way to incentivize a company to provide the best service possible is to tie the use of the…

$2 per gigabyte is absolutely astronomical, the actual cost to major ISP's per gigabyte is literally measured in pennies. I used nearly 2 terabytes last month, so my new bill should be maybe $40 at most. I paid $63, and Comcast just raised me up to $85 3 days ago which I haven't called and bitched about yet. Anyone using <50 gb/month is getting bent over so incredibly hard by the ISPs it's honestly mindblowing.

Not questioning, just asking: Could you please cite data source? I would like to understand this better.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#336

Post by jtc331 »

tomp wrote: post #322
cookiecaper wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these attributes are incumbent in the nature of delivering health care. They're just things that are part of the system today . As you stated, in today's health care system, true costs are obscured. The exact problem is that nefarious corporate forces have removed most of the real market elements by adding layers of indirection (health insurance), which allows everyone in the industry to maximize their dollar…

I disagree about health insurance. I think that in the absence of health insurance, health care wouldn't work. Imagine getting in an accident, you're unconscious, you need emergency assistance. If the hospitals weren't reasonably sure you're insured and can pay for the services, they wouldn't be motivated to help you. Most European countries offer health insurance, and total healthcare costs are much lower (compared…

There's a question though here as to how to define insurance: in your example, everything still works if everyone has catastrophic insurance.

Insurance, classically understood, is risk sharing, not cost sharing. In other words taking it from a "not everyone will use this service" risk sharing model to "everyone will use this at some point" cost sharing model is what causes the problem of hidden pricing.

You can have it both ways (risk sharing and visible prices) because most healthcare costs aren't unforeseen. In other words, the number of accidents where the hospital needs to be relatively sure insurance is involved pales in comparison to the cost of routine visits/care which could be paid for out of pocket and prices would then be visible allowing for competition.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#337

Post by tomp »

jtc331 wrote: post #336
tomp wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree about health insurance. I think that in the absence of health insurance, health care wouldn't work. Imagine getting in an accident, you're unconscious, you need emergency assistance. If the hospitals weren't reasonably sure you're insured and can pay for the services, they wouldn't be motivated to help you. Most European countries offer health insurance, and total healthcare costs are much lower (compared…

There's a question though here as to how to define insurance: in your example, everything still works if everyone has catastrophic insurance. Insurance, classically understood, is risk sharing, not cost sharing. In other words taking it from a "not everyone will use this service" risk sharing model to "everyone will use this at some point" cost sharing model is what causes the problem of hidden pricing. You can have…

That's a good point, which is why there were some suggestions in some European countries about having a "paid first visit" that is refunded if there is actually something wrong with you. I in general support things like this. I also support some parallel "private" medical system, where you can pay to "skip the line" (but e.g. in Slovenia, only certain procedures can be performed in the private system).

However, there are also many medical costs that can be foreseen (even planned for) but are either "beneficial" for the society (e.g. childbirth) or still risky and essentially no-one's fault (e.g. cancer - most people will get it, but some will get it at 50, others at 95). Incidentally, it's cancer and the catastrophic treatments (e.g. heart surgery) that are most expensive. Possibly also because it's in the big-pharma's interest to keep it this way (at least for cancer).

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#338

Post by Silhouette »

tomp wrote: post #323
Silhouette wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you seem to view providing Internet access as a natural monopoly. While (from what I see as an outsider) it seems to be common in the US for households to have only one practical ISP available, that is certainly not the only model possible. For example, here in the UK, we have the formerly nationalised telephone network provider required to allow individual ISPs access to key parts of its infras…

What you describe is the definition of a natural monopoly. However, the monopoly comes from physical wires, not whatever flows over them. So, the infrastructure should be a public good (most infrastructure, really, not just wires, since it's more efficient and less wasteful to build a single network and keep it in excellent condition than to build multiple networks providing the same service at a lower quality), but…

What you describe is the definition of a natural monopoly. However, the monopoly comes from physical wires, not whatever flows over them.

Part of my point was that there is no physical monopoly here, even on the wires.

BT (formerly the national telephone provider) has one set of infrastructure.

Cable companies have their own, literally installing a different box in your home with an independent physical connection to their own network.

If you use one of the mobile providers, which is viable for a home connection in the 3-4G era if you're only using a modest amount of data, there is no physical wiring to the home at all.

There are even a few special cases where people have literally built their own infrastructure as a community, only hooking in to some big provider's network higher up the hierarchy, presumably on some sort of customised, one-off deal.

So while we do have local loop unbundling and a shared-last-mile kind of deal, and we do have ISPs competing for that same physical connection, even that is not a monopoly provision.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#339

Post by Karunamon »

sliverstorm wrote: post #140
LeoPanthera wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix isn't sending their data to customers unsolicited. Customers are requesting that data, through a pipe which they have already paid for . It is unfair for Verizon, or any other ISP, to ask to be paid twice for the same bits. What bits I am asking for, as a customer, shouldn't make a damn bit of difference.

There's two ends to the pipe though. To my understanding, the upstream ends are linked largely thanks to peering , which is based on mutual benefit. At the upstream level, nobody charges other providers because everybody is interacting with everybody- sort of like, "I bought this round, but I know you'll be buying the next" so you don't worry about balancing the books. Then Netflix comes along, chews up 35% of intern…

The only reason we're having this discussion is because it's "one peer".

A thought experiment: Let's pretend it's not Netflix for a moment. Let's pretend there's a bunch of competing streaming media services which happen to take up, combined, the same amount of bandwidth that Netflix does.

In this case, Verizon would still have the same problem (if you buy that they have a problem at all, which I personally do not), except they couldn't play at being mafiosos, holding one in particular to what would be a protection racket in any other context since the load is the same amount, just distributed among many much smaller players.

What would they do in this case?

The fact that it's one large company gives them the ease of threate^H^H^H^H^H^H leveragi^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H negotiating with one entity instead of upgrading their damn network like they're expected to do.

Re: Netflix replies to Verizon cease and desist letter

#340

Post by Karunamon »

jsz0 wrote: post #305
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, can you swear that Netflix is doing all that it can to minimize bandwidth? There's a conflict of interest: Netflix has a vested interested in provided lightly-compressed, very-high-resolution, bandwidth-hungry movies to its subscribers, especially if it obtains 100% free peering that it demands, as bandwidth would be free for them. On the other hand, ISPs are forced to upgrade network any time Netf…

> can you swear that Netflix is doing all that it can to minimize bandwidth? This is an excellent point. Why doesn't NetFlix at very least offer the ability for their users to queue content for download / local caching? If customers had a slow Internet connection at least they could plan ahead to avoid suffering streaming problems. Ironically isn't streaming-only perhaps a violation of net neutrality? NetFlix artific…

>Why doesn't NetFlix at very least offer the ability for their users to queue content for download / local caching?

Because this would almost certainly result in the content industry screaming bloody murder.

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