Netflix CEO Accuses Comcast of Not Practicing Net Neutrality

braindrainbahrain writes "Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has a Facebook page in which he posts a short gripe about Comcast. It seems watching video through the Xfinity app on an Xbox does not counting towards your cap on your Comcast data plan. All other services, Netflix included, do. To quote Hastings: 'For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all. The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment. In what way is this neutral?'" The difference, of course, is that you need a Comcast cable TV subscription in order to have the Xfinity app not count toward your monthly data usage allowance. Then again, you can't exactly sign up for a similar plan through Netflix or Hulu.

Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their own

[Kenja]

Data from Comcast to customer is half the bandwidth compared to data from Netflix to Comcast to customer.

Unicast vs. Multicast

[rogueippacket]

From strictly a technology perspective, there is a difference - IPTV delivered via Multicast can be engineered to reduce bandwidth consumption, and will not be counted as usage by your ISP. If delivered via Unicast, such as Netflix or Youtube, it looks just like every other packet. That is, unless you want your ISP performing DPI to bill you properly based on what you're watching instead of where it's coming from...? Which is more "neutral" - DPI or discrimination by packet type?

Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their

[Anonymous Coward]

This statement makes no sense. The "high bandwidth service" in question in Netflix, Comcast has no say in where this service is located. Unless you mean the high bandwidth service is Xfinity, in which case it is already located within the Comcast network. The fact is, Comcast, and all other ISPs, are being forced to pay significantly more in peering costs due to the massive amount of bandwidth being used by Netflix. Services like Xfinity never leave the Comcast network, so they have no impact on peering agreements.

Now, I fully support Net Neutrality, but situations like this highlight how difficult it is in practice. If Xfinity were to count against usage caps, yes it would be more "fair" in theory. But the fact is, those bandwidth caps are a reflection of the costs of peering agreements, and Netflix raises those costs significantly while Xfinity does not raise them at all, so treating them the same would mean that Xfinity would be indirectly subsidizing Netflix, its direct competitor. The fact is, Hastings doesn't really want Xfinity to count against the cap, he wants Netflix to not count against the cap, a position that is pretty difficult to justify.

Re:not NET neutrality

[TheSunborn]

Not really true. Comcasts WAN is part of the internet. Remember internet is a network of networks.

Re:Comcast is an icon of the "new" Corporate Ameri

[flaming error]

"When the free market turns against them"

Actually, that's never happened. There's never been a free global communications market.

Infrastructure, and those running it, are regulated and taxed/subsidized at different levels at different times, markets, and media.

Re:Why post on facebook?

[binarylarry]

His name is MickeyTheIdiot.

Re:Unicast vs. Multicast

[HellKnite]

Multicast only works as a bandwidth savings device when you're streaming the same content at the same time to multiple devices. I'm not familiar with the Comcast Xfinity service, but to be able to glean any reasonable measure of savings you'd have to watch Xfinity like you do regular TV - shows scheduled at a certain time, not streamed on demand.

Re:Reminds me of Comcasts DNS Hijacking

[The MAZZTer]

Fun fact: Apparently Chrome detects this behavior (by trying to load several nonsensical URLs in the background) and blocks it. 3 Chrome.

Re:Its like it costs Comcast less to stream their

[jmauro]

At a certain point the peerage costs would be equal or greater to just going to the big content providers (Netflix, Youtube, etc) had having them host a cached version on the internal Comcast network that Comcast subscribers would hit first before trying to go out over a peered link (which should then not count against the cap since it's internal).

Since they're not doing that but directly trying to drive customers to the Comcast Xfinity and away from being paying customers of their competition (both in services and in content). They've kind of crossed a line methinks.

Re:This is just a stupid complaint ...

[compro01]

Great! So if i rig my bittorrent client to only connect to peers within Comcast's network, none of that transfer will count against my cap, right? No? Oh right, such concepts will only be applied when it's to Comcast's benefit.

Re:Unicast vs. Multicast

[michael_cain]

On the order of fifteen years ago -- perhaps longer -- people proposed ways to use a small number of multicasts, plus short duration unicasts to provide near video-on-demand service. One of them went as follows (note this only makes sense for reasonably popular content). Multicast multiple copies of the content with an X minute offset between streams. When the user connects, they connect to the stream which has started most recently and begin recording from the current point. The user also begins receiving a unicast stream the delivers the first several minutes of the content (at worst, X minutes, where X is the offset). At the appropriate point, the application switches from the unicast stream to the recorded multicast stream.

Yes, it was a kludge. And got kludgier when you wanted to add things like long pauses (longer than X minutes) without recording the entire stream. But it did reduce the total bandwidth needed to deliver popular on-demand content.

Re:Why post on facebook?

[Dahamma]

Except it's not one man, it's a large corporation with a lot of employees, customers, and general name recognition. This is exactly the reason they formed a PAC...

http://slashdot.org/submission/2014593/netflix-forms-a-pac [slashdot.org]