Appleinsider:
Netflix has been throttling video for AT&T and Verizon mobile subscribers for over five years, the streaming service has newly admitted, claiming it was in customers’ best interests.
The company said it was trying to “protect consumers from exceeding mobile data caps,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
The issue came to the fore last week when T-Mobile CEO John Legere noted that AT&T and Verizon subscribers were getting lower-quality video. The latter carriers denied doing any throttling.
The line, “to protect viewers”, feels like a load of bull. If that’s what they were doing, why not be transparent about it and let the users make the decision whether or not they wanted to be throttled?
On the other hand, it’s hard to see why Netflix would throttle their users except for the reasons stated. Data caps can be exceeded very quickly watching movies. So extra measures to reduce bandwidth just… don’t seem that nefarious to me. It probably would have been preferable if the had given people a choice. As it was though, every user who was inconvenienced by throttling has also benefitted from it. No doubt I’m not cut out to be a telecom provider, but to me, it just seems like a natural solution to the problem at hand. I’d be interest for someone to explain the evil of this move (without tautologies like “all throttling is evil, and this is throttling, therefore it is evil”).