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posted by mattie_p on Friday February 21 2014, @12:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the stop-clogging-the-pipes dept.

dave562 writes: "There was an interesting article posted on Zero Hedge lately on the throttling of Netflix.

'For years, the Netflix streaming business has been growing like a parasite, happy to piggyback on established broadband infrastructures, where the broadband companies themselves have becomes competitors to Netflix for both distribution and content. Until now. Emboldened by the recent Net Neutrality ruling, which has put bandwidth hogs like Netflix which at last check was responsible for over 30% of all downstream US internet traffic, broadband providers are finally making their move, and in a preliminary salvo whose ultimate compromise will be NFLX paying lots of money, have started to throttle Netflix traffic. The WSJ reports (Paywall) that the war between the broadband-ers and the video streaming company has finally emerged from the "cold" phase and is fully hot.'"

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State of the Site: 02/23/2014 108 comments
Well, we've survived our first week as a functional website, and have yet to go belly up because of it. The speed and growth of our community is staggering to say the least, and we are working hard to get this site fully operational. I'm pleased to announce that a development VM is now available for public consumption, and if you're interested in site development, one should join us in #dev on irc.soylentnews.org. Beyond that though, I've got a few points to address on and updated statistics to share ...
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Friday February 21 2014, @12:09AM

    by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 21 2014, @12:09AM (#3892) Journal

    Sounds like they want to get paid twice for the same service.

    Customer pays for service including bandwidth. They want to charge a company for that same bandwidth the customers are paying for. Sounds totally bogus.

    Still, I guess it must be hard, keeping shareholders.... erm... customers happy with their service.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Fnord666 on Friday February 21 2014, @12:30AM

      by Fnord666 (652) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:30AM (#3906) Homepage

      Customer pays for service including bandwidth. They want to charge a company for that same bandwidth the customers are paying for. Sounds totally bogus.

      One thing that we sometimes forget and that is missing from the above statement is that the internet is not one big happy entity. It's a big collection of somewhat cooperative networks that, sometimes only grudgingly, pass traffic to each other. That cooperation occurs through peering arrangements that assume a certain balance in the traffic between the peers. When someone like Netflix comes along and disrupts that balance, the relationship becomes lopsided and one network or the other begins to feel more of the financial burden of that traffic. At that point they start looking for ways to seek compensation for the imbalance. They can try to get customers to pay or they can try to get the source of the imbalance to foot the bill. It looks like they are hoping to have success with the latter approach.

      PS - I don't work in networking at the backbone level so please enlighten me if I am wrong.

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Friday February 21 2014, @12:38AM

        by Nerdfest (80) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:38AM (#3911)

        From what I hear, NetFlix is quite happy to provide CDN equipment to ISPs to reduce load, but some of them (Verizon) have decided they'd rather just throttle their traffic instead. Unless the FCC is given some power, the end of the internet as we know it is becoming a reality.

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Friday February 21 2014, @01:41AM

          by GungnirSniper (1671) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:41AM (#3962) Journal

          Since Verizon and most other broadband ISPs are also cable TV services, they have an incentive to keep people from cutting the TV cord. One way they are doing that is by offering their own on-demand service bundled with the TV service (Comcast does on-demand for NBC, for example) while degrading outsider services. So even if NetFlix is offering to help reduce the load, it's still not to Verizon's benefit to accept the help.

          It's amazing we in the US went from ownership limits and combo limits (newspapers could not own a TV station) only a few decades ago to allowing these mega-corps to dominate every media platform nationwide.

          • (Score: 5, Informative) by dry on Friday February 21 2014, @02:29AM

            by dry (223) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:29AM (#4002) Journal

            It's amazing we in the US went from ownership limits and combo limits (newspapers could not own a TV station) only a few decades ago to allowing these mega-corps to dominate every media platform nationwide.

            Same thing has happened in Canada and for the consumers it sure hasn't been an improvement, our prices make Americas broadband and cell service look inexpensive and fast.
            It has been good for government as with most all media being in agreement about who we should elect, it is easier for the government to get re-elected and if not in agreement well the government just threatens to allow an American mega-corp such as Verizon into the country, all in the name of consumer choice.

          • (Score: 2, Interesting) by mojo chan on Friday February 21 2014, @08:26AM

            by mojo chan (266) on Friday February 21 2014, @08:26AM (#4164)

            As far as I'm concerned if my 100Mb broadband service can't stream Netflix in 1080p then it is broken. Broken service means compensation in the form of a reduced bill, and that is what I had for about six months when Virgin broke YouTube.

            --
            const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
        • (Score: 2, Informative) by captain normal on Friday February 21 2014, @03:01AM

          by captain normal (2205) on Friday February 21 2014, @03:01AM (#4024)

          Released on the 19th, here is a statement by the chairman of the FCC: [url=http://www.fcc.gov/document/statement-fcc-cha irman-tom-wheeler-fccs-open-internet-rules]Tom Wheeler statment[/url]

          --
          Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @08:14AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @08:14AM (#4162)

            It amounts to "we are going to wait for the train wreck, then form committee's to study the problem until the hate mail stops. we might do something if you fly a plane into our building."

        • (Score: 1) by weilawei on Friday February 21 2014, @10:14AM

          by weilawei (109) on Friday February 21 2014, @10:14AM (#4200)

          Unless the FCC is given some power,

          Never thought I'd hear that one on /.^H^HSN.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Friday February 21 2014, @02:25PM

          by digitalaudiorock (688) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:25PM (#4310) Journal

          My big complaint about broadband in this country (even being in an area with good broadband competition...CV and Verizon FIOS) is how it's virtually always tied to someone trying to sell you pay TV. I've never had pay TV in 25 years in this house (antenna with a three tuner MythTV system here). With more and more Internet based entertainment options coming along, that becomes a bigger issue for me all the time.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Swervin on Friday February 21 2014, @03:27PM

          by Swervin (2444) on Friday February 21 2014, @03:27PM (#4358)

          I work for a small ISP. They'll provide peering if you have more than 2Gb/s of traffic. This becomes a problem for small ISPs without a lot of traffic. We're working to install our own caching solution though, which will help with the load and has the nice side effect of improving service for our customers.

          Netflix's CDN guidelines: https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines [netflix.com]

        • (Score: 1) by linsane on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:43PM

          by linsane (633) on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:43PM (#5266)
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Daniel Dvorkin on Friday February 21 2014, @12:47AM

        by Daniel Dvorkin (1099) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:47AM (#3919) Journal

        [T]he internet is not one big happy entity. It's a big collection of somewhat cooperative networks that, sometimes only grudgingly, pass traffic to each other.

        "The internet" is defined by cooperative networks passing traffic to each other. Whether the people running the networks do so "grudgingly" doesn't really matter, so long as the networks themselves are set up to pass the traffic with a minimum of fuss. When people start screwing with that, it's perilously close to not being the internet any more.

        --
        Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Friday February 21 2014, @01:52AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:52AM (#3971) Journal

        The internet has always been Bring your own Bandwidth.
        You pay for your own connection to your ISP, and your ISP pays the upstream and the upstream pays the backbone.

        But Fnord666's post above, seems to suggest NetFlix sneaks its traffic onto the net without paying a cent. This is clearly false. They pay their ISP (they likely bypass everybody and connect direct to the backbone carrier) and they pay an enormous price.

        So the OP is correct, all this grousing is double dipping by the local ISPs and low level upstream providers.

        Still, as pointed out by others, Netflix works with ISPs to put their servers as close to the head-ends of ISPs so as not to inflate their traffic to the backbone. Every megabyte they save the ISP from having to pay the upstream is that much money left in the ISP's bank.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ztoth on Friday February 21 2014, @03:51AM

      by ztoth (821) on Friday February 21 2014, @03:51AM (#4059)

      I wonder how long until they take the next logical step.. charging customers to have access to netflix, on top of charging netflix to carry their traffic (which is going to be paid by customers eventually), after both sides have already paid for bandwidth.

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @05:20AM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Friday February 21 2014, @05:20AM (#4097) Journal

      I'd mod you to +6 (if I had mod points and going above 5 was possible).

      I pay for my bandwidth, which includes a 300gb cap. I should get to use that to the maximum speed under my plan. That's what what was advertised, what I paid for, and to not give it to me is a kind of fraud.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by ragequit on Friday February 21 2014, @12:11AM

    by ragequit (44) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:11AM (#3894) Journal

    That ol' parasitic netflix. Who probably has an SLA from their up/downstreams. Probably paying Mbux for those. But let's go ahead and blame this on the content providers rather than on the carriers with their publicly funded infrastructure and record profits.

    --
    The above views are fabricated for your reading pleasure.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Friday February 21 2014, @05:24AM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Friday February 21 2014, @05:24AM (#4100) Journal

      What's really kind of ironic about calling Netflix "parasitic" is that the broadband providers probably have gained a lot of customers because dial up or a crappy DSL just won't cut it for Netflix. In other words, if they kill Netflix, a lot of their current customers won't need broadband.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Fnord666 on Friday February 21 2014, @12:11AM

    by Fnord666 (652) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:11AM (#3895) Homepage
    Posting pay-walled articles is something that I think we should be discussing with regards to SN. If we want to have a meaningful conversation about the article and issue at hand, I think it is important that members be able to actually read the article. Whether they do is a different matter, but at least give them a chance. I would be very interested in hearing how other people feel about this.

    A case in point is this article. We all know that the various digital media distributors are at odds with the larger carriers. There have been numerous articles posted recently about the topic. Without being able to read the article itself, I have no idea what makes this story any different than the dozen others in the last week about the same thing. Why is this article front page worthy and how can I, as a SN reader, find that out?

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by mattie_p on Friday February 21 2014, @12:53AM

      by mattie_p (13) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:53AM (#3925) Journal

      Hi there, editor here. I goofed in editing. There was a very interesting article [zerohedge.com] originally linked in the summary that I accidentally deleted while I was formatting for publication. Oops! I just stuck it back in, you should see it soon. I agree that the primary source of a story here should never exclusively be a paywalled article.

      As a side note: If you are submitting an article, hyperlink your source to keywords, don't just stick it as a raw URL in the beginning or end of your submission. Please make our jobs as editors easier and hot link it within your submission, so that we can continue to provide quality stories to the community. Thanks for reading! ~mattie_p

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @01:06AM

        by Angry Jesus (182) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:06AM (#3939)

        As a side note: If you are submitting an article, hyperlink your source to keywords, don't just stick it as a raw URL in the beginning or end of your submission. Please make our jobs as editors easier and hot link it within your submission, so that we can continue to provide quality stories to the community.

        You should spell it out that way on the story submission page. I see that you have something to that effect, but it is a lot more vague than what you just wrote. It is OK to have longer instructions, just break them up into readable chunks, like a checklist rather than a "wall of text."

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Friday February 21 2014, @02:06AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:06AM (#3979) Journal

        Another thing I's like to see discouraged is link baiting by posting some thin blog post, or commercial site (like space.com) for a story when the free and more authoritative source (such as NASA.gov) is just as easily linked.

        Of course, in some cases you might find someplace that provides more analysis than the direct source, but just as often people link these sites just to send traffic to them.

        If its worth submitting, its worth researching, and following links a little deeper.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 1) by hankwang on Friday February 21 2014, @07:20AM

        by hankwang (100) on Friday February 21 2014, @07:20AM (#4144) Homepage

        "hyperlink your source to keywords, don't just stick it as a raw URL in the beginning or end of your submission. Please make our jobs as editors easier... "

        Well, that's only fair if most submissions are accepted. To spend extra effort in embedding links is not worth the trouble if 4 out of 5 submissions are rejected. Probably not yet the case here, but it will be.

        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by lhsi on Friday February 21 2014, @02:45PM

          by lhsi (711) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:45PM (#4327) Journal

          "hyperlink your source to keywords, don't just stick it as a raw URL in the beginning or end of your submission. Please make our jobs as editors easier... "

          Well, that's only fair if most submissions are accepted. To spend extra effort in embedding links is not worth the trouble if 4 out of 5 submissions are rejected. Probably not yet the case here, but it will be.

          I put the effort in to hyperlink an article while submitting the story on my phone and it was still rejected ;-)

          I think having some sort of feedback for why something was rejected would be nice, even if it was one of a couple of predefined reasons like "not interesting" or "out of date" or something.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday February 21 2014, @12:57AM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Friday February 21 2014, @12:57AM (#3932) Homepage

      Agree re paywalled articles. Perhaps editors should research to find other sources?

      I think the difference in this story is that net neutrality has been dressed up as some evil hippy concept, and the connectivity providers think that they will get away with it. Which they will, but that's veering in the direction of politics, so I'll stop here.

      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @01:02AM

      by Angry Jesus (182) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:02AM (#3935)

      It is pretty easy to get past these "leaky" paywalls. I read the article without any hassle at all.

      Here's what I do:

      (1) Install "self-destructing cookies" -- It is an add-on that deletes all of a site's cookies 10 seconds after you leave the site (close the tab or just follow a link to somewhere else). The default settings are pretty good, if anything you might want to turn off notifications because it works so well that you can just install it and forget about it for any site that you don't want to remember you. (It has a white-list for the sites you do want to remember you.)

      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sel f-destructing-cookies/ [mozilla.org]

      (2) Install RefControl -- Lets you change the http-referer header on a per site basis. Then set it to use "http://google.com/" as the referer for 3rd party requests (first link to a website but not any internal links).
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ref control/ [mozilla.org]

      That's enough to get past most of these semi-paywalls like NYTimes, WSJ, etc.

      FWIW, discovering this was a side-effect of trying to protect my privacy. It's just serendipitous that their desire to track the crap out of you makes them vulnerable to people who don't want to be tracked.

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by zim on Friday February 21 2014, @05:00AM

      by zim (1251) on Friday February 21 2014, @05:00AM (#4085)
      Read? Article?

      Oh come on. We're a slashdot replacement. This is no place for actually reading the articles..

      Skim the summary and come into the comments to read and make outrageous arguments! It's the soylent way!
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JeanCroix on Friday February 21 2014, @02:31PM

        by JeanCroix (573) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:31PM (#4315)
        Maybe in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, Soylent should actually break from the /. model and expect commenters to RTFA. It's like going back in a time machine to prevent a chain of events - that could be the one which prevents dice.com from showing up in front of mattie_p's house in two years with a dump truck full of cash...
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by No Respect on Friday February 21 2014, @12:13AM

    by No Respect (991) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:13AM (#3896)

    We're moving from NY to Florida next month. I was looking forward to trying Netflix once we got there, but Comcast is the only highspeed internet choice where we're going. No Netflix for me! (ATT U-Verse is available, but it's a lot slower than Comcast's offering since it's not an FTTP area)

    There have been reports that Comcast - and others - have been throttling Netflix since before the recent net neutrality court decision, so whether or not we ultimately took the plunge to give Netflix a try was iffy to begin with. The threat of not getting consistent and reliable, either now or in the future, is costing Netflix real money, right now. At least in my personal quantum of sample size.

    Looking at the lobbyists arrayed on the issue, I don't see any way net neutrality survives much longer. The current FCC chairman himself is a former lobbyist from what I hear. When his tenure is up he'll go right back through that revolving door into the arms of grateful telecoms who will reward him handsomely for his service.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Astax on Friday February 21 2014, @05:06AM

      by Astax (1979) on Friday February 21 2014, @05:06AM (#4088)

      I have Netflix in NJ (Over the river) and while they may throttle, I sure as hell never noticed this. Comcast Internet is totally overpriced garbage, but I am able to view Netflix just fine. Your mileage may vary. Few years ago they also put some sort of datacaps into the unlimited service... once again I never hit said cap so it had 0 impact on me.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by keick on Friday February 21 2014, @05:50PM

      by keick (719) on Friday February 21 2014, @05:50PM (#4435)

      I thought I'd jump in and say.... Just try it.

      I'm on a 8 year old 3Mbps DSL link and I use netflix every single night. Most of the time, after a couple minutes of watching, the stream flips to high-def. They have some amazing compression.

      Two months ago I got boosted to a theoretical 7mbps, and yes now I can watch two netflix shows simultaneously... But usually all this means is that when my wife decided she needs her netflix fix, I don't get lagged out of xbox live :)

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Spinlock on Friday February 21 2014, @12:13AM

    by Spinlock (1021) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:13AM (#3897)

    This should not be front page Soylent News.

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by dereismdave on Friday February 21 2014, @12:20AM

      by dereismdave (897) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:20AM (#3899)

      After 9 hours with no new stories... I'll take any article!

      --
      "If you aren't gonna say exactly how and what you feel, you might as well not say anything at all." - Johnny Cash
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @10:21AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @10:21AM (#4202)
        To complete the Soylent metaphor, instead of jonesing, you're thorning?
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by joshuajon on Friday February 21 2014, @02:11PM

        by joshuajon (807) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:11PM (#4300)
        You could, y'know, submit [soylentnews.org] one...
        • (Score: 2, Funny) by dereismdave on Friday February 21 2014, @03:03PM

          by dereismdave (897) on Friday February 21 2014, @03:03PM (#4344)

          Thank you for your wonderful response. I will submit a story titled "Identifying Sarcasm in a Forum Post" ASAP /sarcasm

          --
          "If you aren't gonna say exactly how and what you feel, you might as well not say anything at all." - Johnny Cash
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @12:22AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @12:22AM (#3901)

      Agree. Not because of the subject matter, I think Netflix throttling is worthy of discussion, but most of us can't read a pay-walled article!

      • (Score: 2) by mattie_p on Friday February 21 2014, @12:54AM

        by mattie_p (13) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:54AM (#3928) Journal

        I just fixed that, read above for my explanation about that. Thanks for reading!

    • (Score: 2) by mattie_p on Friday February 21 2014, @01:03AM

      by mattie_p (13) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:03AM (#3936) Journal

      I'm sorry you feel that way. I already feel badly for omitting the original article [zerohedge.com], which I have now rectified. May I ask why you don't think this story should be here, in its corrected form? Thanks for reading! ~mattie_p

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Spinlock on Friday February 21 2014, @02:41AM

        by Spinlock (1021) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:41AM (#4010)

        It shows a clear bias. This is where editors are required.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Friday February 21 2014, @01:51AM

      by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 21 2014, @01:51AM (#3969) Journal

      Not saying you don't have a right to an opinion, but this is EXACTLY the sort of story that I want on the front page of the site. It is mixing technology and yro in a single story. As a nerd, Net Neutrality and ISPs doing "dodgey shit" is exactly the sort of thing I don't want swept under the carpet.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by jcd on Friday February 21 2014, @12:22AM

    by jcd (883) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:22AM (#3900)

    Holy non-neutral summaries, Batman!

    I don't honestly mind seeing this in the news (net neutrality is definitely a worthy topic), but dropping phrases like "growing like a parasite" and "bandwidth hog" in the summary is going to be a turnoff to new visitors and people who like to make up their own minds about things. Even if said phrases are true.

    Ontopic: Net neutrality for the win. I've seen my own network heavily optimized. If I'm watching youtube videos, etherape shows that they're actually coming from local caching servers in chunks rather than straight from google. I don't mind optimization, but I do mind giant corps taking out their feuds on their customers to make a point.

    --
    "What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by mattie_p on Friday February 21 2014, @12:56AM

      by mattie_p (13) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:56AM (#3930) Journal
      It wasn't clear because I goofed, but that is a direct quote from the article that I didn't link to originally. I fixed it. See my explanation above [soylentnews.org]. Thanks for reading! ~mattie_p
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by jcd on Friday February 21 2014, @01:01AM

        by jcd (883) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:01AM (#3934)

        Oh, I get it. Not a problem then.

        Man, it has got to suck to be an editor. One little slipup and we all pounce like hyenas. Keep up the good work!

        --
        "What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Nobuddy on Friday February 21 2014, @03:47AM

      by Nobuddy (1626) on Friday February 21 2014, @03:47AM (#4054)

      True? Netflix pays for their bandwidth, and so does the customer. The only parasites are the ISP's wanting to double dip in that traffic.

      • (Score: 2) by jcd on Friday February 21 2014, @04:07AM

        by jcd (883) on Friday February 21 2014, @04:07AM (#4066)

        I agree with you. The ISPs are totally out of line. I just meant as a general rule.

        --
        "What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by gallondr00nk on Friday February 21 2014, @12:32AM

    by gallondr00nk (392) on Friday February 21 2014, @12:32AM (#3907)

    Ars has had a couple of articles on the subject recently: here [arstechnica.com] and here [arstechnica.com]

    I'm not sure about the parasite label (editor sarcasm?), but I feel like letting huge cable / big media conglomerates call the shots for most of the Internet will only harm it in the long run. We should know by now that they really aren't to be trusted.

    I mean, that's the point of regulation, to prevent abuses. It isn't a competitive enough environment for free market forces to curb the worst excesses, so something like Net Neutrality seems vitally important.

    But then, I'm sure those former lobbyists in the government know better than I..

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by WildWombat on Friday February 21 2014, @01:04AM

    by WildWombat (1428) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:04AM (#3937)

    Here are a couple of links to non-paywalled articles covering the same topic:

    http://business.time.com/2014/02/19/netflix-verizo n-peering/ [time.com]
    http://consumerist.com/2014/02/19/why-even-a-net-n eutrality-rewrite-wouldnt-alleviate-slow-netflix-s ervice/ [consumerist.com]

    I don't understand the need to link to articles most of us aren't going to read because its hidden behind a paywall. While I don't mind paying for certain content (Netflix, for example) there is no way in hell I'm going to give money to the corporate propaganda machine that is Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. He came right out and admitted that he would be using it to sell his view on things when he bought it.

    As to the whole Netflix vs the ISPs debate...In my opinion the ISPs are completely and totally in the wrong. Their customers are already paying for that bandwidth. They shouldn't have any right to tell their customers how to use that bandwidth. The only reason they are fighting back so hard against Netflix is because so many of them own their own content companies and don't want competition. They're using their control of the last mile (their ISP business) to lock out competitors in a different industry (Television). Even without net neutrality rules that type of behavior is exactly what anti-trust law was designed to prevent.

    On a side note I'm going to plug the ISP I use, http://sonic.net/ [sonic.net] because they're great. You don't have to pay extra for static IPs, they fight for your privacy and they strongly support net neutrality. Also, if you do have a problem you can get someone on the phone who actually knows their shit without having to wade through a phone tree for an hour.

    Cheers,
    -WW

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by mattie_p on Friday February 21 2014, @01:07AM

      by mattie_p (13) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:07AM (#3942) Journal

      I'm responding to as many people as I can so you can see I goofed. Its fixed now, see my explanation above. [soylentnews.org] ~mattie_p

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by johnlenin1 on Friday February 21 2014, @01:57AM

        by johnlenin1 (707) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:57AM (#3973)

        You know what else is awesome about SN? This kind of dialog and transparency about the site and the processes going on. It's almost like the other site prided itself on its operations being opaque to the users. Thanks again for keeping us so well informed, for keeping a good attitude (hard though that must be at times!), and for keeping the signal so high!

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by cybro on Friday February 21 2014, @01:07AM

    by cybro (1144) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:07AM (#3941)

    Hello, I believe that there must be something that I am missing.

    I run several dedicated servers, they cost money every month and that includes a certain bandwidth allocation built into the price. More bandwidth per month costs more money per month.

    I believe the data centers pay large amounts of money to the backbone providers to get multiple unmetered 10gbit links to the internet, which they then oversell to a certain extent to the people like me who hire the dedicated servers, so that bandwidth is fully paid for.

    And then at home I pay my ISP for an internet connection, a cheap connection has say 50gb a month with speed limiting for the rest of the month if you go over. You can upgrade to a business connection where no speed limiting occurs but you get charged something like 20c a gigabyte over the monthly allocation. And for $90 a month I can get a 600gb a month bandwidth allocation, which is my current plan from my ISP.

    So that is fully paid for.

    Where exactly is netflix getting free access? Surely they have to pay someone to get access to the internet at all, unless they themselves are a tier-1 backbone provider?

    Apologies if this is a stupid question but I am certain there must be other people like me who are confused about this.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by WildWombat on Friday February 21 2014, @01:21AM

      by WildWombat (1428) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:21AM (#3949)

      "Where exactly is netflix getting free access? Surely they have to pay someone to get access to the internet at all, unless they themselves are a tier-1 backbone provider?"

      Netflix isn't getting anything for free. They're paying their own way. So are their customers who have already paid for their bandwidth. The problem is that our major ISPs are greedy motherfuckers who almost always have a local monopoly or duopoly and the vast amounts of power that come with that. They're double dipping and trying to get Netflix to pay a second time for Bandwidth that the ISPs customers have already paid for. It should be fucking criminal but when you own as many lawmakers as the major ISPs you get to write the laws....

      Hope that helps clear up any confusion.

      Cheers,
      -WW

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by dry on Friday February 21 2014, @02:38AM

        by dry (223) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:38AM (#4007) Journal

        You forgot to add that the ISPs have also expanded into content and are directly competing with netflix so naturally want to leverage their monopoly in the ISP business to push their media business.
        At one time there were rules about what a company could own, rules meant to foster competition and somehow we got sold on the idea that no regulations (actually just certain regulations) is better for competition.

        • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @04:28AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @04:28AM (#4074)

          But the rules are ebil socialism!! How dare you question deregulation. Corporations are model citizens and would never screw consumers over when allowed to self-regulate!

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by No Respect on Friday February 21 2014, @01:25AM

    by No Respect (991) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:25AM (#3950)

    Occasionally they pick up on a good story but to me, most of their story submissions are thinly disguised political agendas. I hope Soylent doesn't become an echo chamber for that shithole.

    With that being said, if I already pay for Comcast (which I will be shortly) and I already pay for Netflix (which I won't be doing, see earlier comment), then why in the world would I - or should I - be willing to pay for VPN service on top of all that?

    From what I've heard about Comcast I wouldn't be surprised if they're buying up VPN services and using them to extract additional fees from their broadband internet customers just for the "privilege" of being allowed to view Netflix.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by linsane on Friday February 21 2014, @07:23AM

      by linsane (633) on Friday February 21 2014, @07:23AM (#4147)

      Cesspool, yes I would agree. Worthless? Absolutely not. At the very least it can be quite funny to drop by and have a look at the rants, but more importantly for SN it shows what can go so horribly wrong if the comment moderation system on a site is horribly broken or just plain absent...

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by chewbacon on Friday February 21 2014, @02:05AM

    by chewbacon (1032) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:05AM (#3978)
    How much throttling are we talking about? So say you're watching a 90 minute film. You really only need enough bandwidth to keep ahead of the frame you're viewing so you don't buffer like an old Real Player video. I think throttling to give you said bandwidth is reasonable to keep the network flowing for the growing userbase of video streamers. Why download a 90 minute movie stream in 10 minutes?
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by dry on Friday February 21 2014, @02:41AM

      by dry (223) on Friday February 21 2014, @02:41AM (#4009) Journal

      I'd think that no-one would be complaining if movies played without stuttering and minimal buffering at first.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by TheloniousToady on Friday February 21 2014, @04:40AM

        by TheloniousToady (820) on Friday February 21 2014, @04:40AM (#4081)

        I get that even on short films: it seems to happen at the end of every Looney Tune I watch.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @04:31AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @04:31AM (#4076)

      No you need much more of a buffer than 1 frame due to all sorts of issues such as to handle UDP packet reordering, allowances for dropped/corrupted frames, etc. That idiotic statements like your's gets rated insightful is quite sad.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Desler on Friday February 21 2014, @04:34AM

      by Desler (880) on Friday February 21 2014, @04:34AM (#4078)

      No one is claiming that a 90 minute movie should be downloaded in 10 minutes. But plenty of people are seeing issues where they can't get a high quality stream, which only needs like 3-4mbit/sec, because of the throttling that kicks them to the shit quality version.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Desler on Friday February 21 2014, @04:39AM

        by Desler (880) on Friday February 21 2014, @04:39AM (#4080)

        To add, you can also find reports of AT&T gigapower users with supposed 300mbit/s connections that can't even get the HD stream from Netflix. And that would only end up using less than 1.5% of the bandwidth they are being sold.

        • (Score: 1) by chewbacon on Friday February 21 2014, @01:37PM

          by chewbacon (1032) on Friday February 21 2014, @01:37PM (#4281)

          Fair enough. That puts it in perspective. I'm a Vudu user and haven't noticed any issues and I'm a Cox customer. It's probably only a matter of time, however. We can always go back to pirating movies.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by stupid on Friday February 21 2014, @07:38AM

    by stupid (2631) on Friday February 21 2014, @07:38AM (#4152)

    I doubt I've ever read an article summary so poorly written (certainly not on slashdot!). Unsurprisingly it came from zerohedge, that renowned bastion of literacy. I suppose austerity as a tenant of libertarian philosophy may preclude the existence of actual editing.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @09:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 21 2014, @09:33AM (#4185)

    No DRM in HTML!
    https://defectivebydesign.org/netflix [defectivebydesign.org]