Matt Peckham for TIME.com:
If you own the highway as well as several of the vehicles that use it, is it fair to tax everyone except your drivers? That’s essentially what Comcast did when it decided to exempt its TV-based Xfinity “On Demand” service for the Xbox 360 from counting against periodic data caps, effectively un-leveling the playing field. Comcast’s defense: The service is delivered over its private IP network, not the public Internet.
Should that exempt Comcast? Absolutely not, according to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. “Comcast no longer following net neutrality principles,” writes Hastings on his Facebook page. “Comcast should apply caps equally, or not at all.”
I doubt Comcast is going to get a lot of complaints from its own customers that it’s offering them “favored nation” status, but Hastings is right – it’s the principle of the thing, and this is what some activists who are concerned over net neutrality feared would happen.
Talk about a “walled garden.”
This is bad news for Apple customers.
Doesn’t this start to get into anti-competitive behavior? Comcast is using its near-monopoly as an ISP to help its TV business by making it harder for competitors to deliver content.
I think the bigger problem this raises isn’t issues of quality of service, rather the fragmentation of the internet. If this stands before too long we are going to have a Comcast internet, an AT&T Internet, a BT Internet, etc. etc.
If I were a lawyer I would argue that from a couch perspective the customer just assumes that what they are getting is from the internet, and that whether they stream it on Netflix or Xfinity it’s all the same ‘tubes’ so to speak. It’s horribly confusing on the customer’s end and terribly anti-competitive.
How much does it cost to produce a bit anyway? Oh wait, bits aren’t a finite resource….
No, it doesn’t. Sure, it’s a dick move, but there’s nothing to stop Netflix from making similar deals with other ISP’s for it’s service to the exclusion of others (like Hulu or iTunes). And there’s nothing to stop any other streaming service or ISP from doing the same.
However, it will royally screw up any idea of net neutrality. But then, the ISP’s really don’t want to be just a utility.