FCC’s Netflix Internet Peering Inquiry – Top Ten Questions – Part 17 Netflix Series

Published June 20, 2014
  1. Does Netflix have any responsibility to help provide its users the streaming service that they paid Netflix for by connecting with ISPs in the high quality manner that most all other content delivery networks do? In other words, why is Netflix such an outlier here?
  2. More specifically, when Netflix customers pay Netflix for its video streaming service, does Netflix have any responsibility to its paying streaming customers to plan, arrange, and pay for widely-available, competitive, Internet paid-peering or content-delivery-network arrangements that are most likely to ensure the highest-quality Netflix customer-streaming-experience, or is it everyone else’s legal responsibility on the Internet, but Netflix’, to ensure quality streaming to Netflix’ customers?
  3. Why is it the financial responsibility of ISPs to automatically and immediately compensate for the streaming-quality implications of Netflix’ business decisions to serve its customers over the least-costly Internet access path for Netflix at any given time, when Netflix knows full well that its cost-cutting delivery strategy necessarily has negative streaming-quality implications for its paying customers?
  4. What law or court decision requires or obligates ISPs to overbuild their network infrastructure to handle whatever amount of industry-leading downstream traffic Netflix chooses to route wherever it wants to, without warning, and without any financial arrangement to pay for their extraordinary capacity surges?
  5. Is Netflix operating and negotiating in good faith, and in a commercially-reasonable way, with the ISPs about which it is complaining?
  6. Is it “commercially reasonable” to expect in a business negotiation that business A must pay all of business B’s business costs so that business B can profit at the direct expense of business A?
  7. Since Netflix appears to be involved one way or another in most all of the peering disputes covered by the media, could Netflix, (with the market power that comes with being the nation’s largest generator of downstream traffic — 34% per Sandvine), have any obligation under the FCC’s 706 authority to be as transparent in its network management decisions and delivery-quality-assurance choices as ISPs are?
  8. If only one side of a potential peering dispute, the ISP, were to have an FCC obligation to be publicly transparent, but not the Nation’s largest Internet delivery network, doesn’t that transparency imbalance perversely incent Netflix to arbitrage and game the PR situation because the public can’t know the whole story?
  9. Why does Netflix demand the ISP delivery mechanism pay for the whole cost of delivering Netflix’ one-third of downstream Internet traffic, when Netflix has paid the U.S. Postal Service hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver its DVDs to many of the same customers?
  10. If Netflix and others can use unlimited amounts of bandwidth and not pay their fair share of the Internet’s infrastructure costs, what economic incentive would there be to upgrade the Internet’s infrastructure to keep pace with their exploding demand, if Internet infrastructure costs were to be completely divorced from Internet infrastructure prices?

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Netflix Research Series

Part 1:  Level 3 & Net Neutrality – Ignorance Unleashed! [11-30-10]

Part 2:  Level 3-Netflix Expose their Hidden Agenda [12-3-10]

Part 3:  Sinking Level 3 Seeking FCC Internet Regulation Bailout [12-8-10]

Part 4:  Netflix’ Open Internet Entitlement Hubris [2-1-11]

Part 5:  Fact-Checking Netflix’ Net Neutrality WSJ Op-ed [7-8-11]

Part 6:  Netflix’ Glass House Temper Tantrum Over Broadband Usage Fees [7-26-11]

Part 7:  Netflix Crushes its Own Momentum [9-20-11]

Part 8:  Netflix the Unpredictable [10-10-11]

Part 9:  Is Netflix the AOL of Web Streaming? [3-9-12]

Part 10: Netflix’ Net Neutrality Corporate Welfare Plan [5-9-12]

Part 11: 5 BIG Implications from Court Signals on Net Neutrality – A Special Report [9-13-13]

Part 12: Video: Why FCC Title II Reclassification of Broadband is a Legal Non-Starter [9-22-13]

Part 13:  Is Net Neutrality Trying to Mutate into an Economic Entitlement? [1-12-14]

Part 14:  Exposing Netflix’ Extraordinary Net Neutrality Arbitrage [1-24-14]

Part 15: Net Neutrality is about Consumer Benefit Not Corporate Welfare for Netflix [3-21-14]

Part 16: Exposing Netflix’ Biggest Net Neutrality Deceptions [6-5-14]

[Originally published at Precursor Blog]