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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.'"
(Score: 5, Informative) by WildWombat on Friday February 21 2014, @01:04AM
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]n eutrality-rewrite-wouldnt-alleviate-slow-netflix-s ervice/ [consumerist.com]
http://consumerist.com/2014/02/19/why-even-a-net-
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
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
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!