Oh Comcast, I hate you so. I hate everything about you. Your pseudo monopoly
on the Mid-Atlantic. Your shitty service. The way one of the service guys you
sent out spent an hour in my apartment during which he took a break to get
stoned. But I am bound to you if I want Internet access in my apartment, but
you will get no more money from me. Which is why I’m pissed about your
relationship with Netflix. Netflix, who I pay for a service.
I’m
not an expert on much of anything, let alone net neutrality, but that is what I’m
going to attempt to write about. Edward
Wyatt and Noam Cohen write about the Comcast and Netflix service deal for The New York Times. Comcast as you know
may be the corporate manifestation of a lesser devil, has announced an agreement
on Sunday that Netflix will pay Comcast for faster and more reliable access to
Comcast’s subscribers. This is new because previously content providers didn’t
have to pay for access to customers of broadband providers.
However,
the broadband companies are growing more and more powerful, and then they
increased their leverage over sites whose traffic takes more of the network’s
capacity. Think Netflix and YouTube specifically being pushed around by
Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. I’m not asserting that Netflix and YouTube have
no power or responsibility here, but the broadband providers appear to be the
cause. Of course this agreement comes 10 days after Comcast agreed to acquire
Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, this will make Comcast the provider to about
one-third of American homes as a cable provider and they’d be the high-speed
Internet company for 40 percent.
So does this agreement between Comcast and Netflix violate net neutrality? A definitive we’re not sure, and that isn’t just me who has a limited understanding of how the Internet works outside of my connection. Refresher net neutrality pretty much allows all content providers to have equal and free access to consumers. People close to the deal are on the side of this is pretty common for a middleman to carry traffic to a broadband provider, which then moves it to the consumer’s home. We don’t know how much the agreement is worth. The press release notes that “Netflix received no preferential network treatment under the multiyear agreement.”
However,
there are skeptics such as Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and advocate
for net neutrality. He says this is the first of such agreements where
broadband providers can extract payment for sending specific content through
its network. One of the fears here is that wealthy companies will be the only
companies that can afford to pay for these deals so it stifles new companies.
The
agreement follows that January ruling from the federal appeals court which said
the Federal Communications Commission overstepped its authority with the net neutrality
rules. Had the court upheld the rules this deal might not exist. The broadband
providers are playing down their role in service problems. They’ve been blaming
middlemen who in their opinion are “trying to shove too much data through too
small a pipe.”
*Side
eye* Netflix will no longer use an intermediary to deliver content. So the
Comcast-Netflix deal is “paid peering” which is a deal struck between companies
that manage the plumbing of the Internet, usually invisible to consumers. This
shouldn’t be confused with “paid prioritization” which is a net neutrality
violation where companies pay to be moved through the pipes more quickly.
So obviously I’m opposed to Comcast growing even more, I think
they have enough. I’m also a proponent of net neutrality. There is no reason
some companies content should be prioritized over others for a fee. I just can’t
get past the implications of that on alternative media. At this point we’ll
just have to wait to see how this works in the long run and what other
companies begin cutting deals like this.
