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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this become anti-competitive at a certain point?

You as the customer buy two (or more) services from Company A. They require you agree to stringent terms on one of those services in order to cut back your use of Company B's services.

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Being anti-competitive is not illegal in most cases.

It's only illegal when you're a monopoly, I believe. In many areas (such as mine), there is only one cable provider (and we don't have FIOS either).

Honestly, if anyone is getting the short end here, it's comcast. Imagine if some loophole allowed FedEx to tie trailers onto UPS's delivery trucks. That's exactly what netflix is doing to comcast.

What? No it isn't at all. Comcast is just getting upset that people are using the service they are paying for. The same goes for AT&T and their removal of their "unlimited" data plan after the iPhone became popular and they realized that people actually enjoy using what they pay for. Your analogy would make more sense if you said imagine if FedEx paid UPS enormous amounts of money every month to ship a fixed number of packages and FedEx actually used the service they paid for to ship packages via UPS.

I think a closer analogy would involve USPS first charging you for building and paving the road to your house, and then wanting to charge you extra when you would like FedEx to drive on that road to deliver something to your house.

I'm okay with that analogy, if we understand that the USPS made an agreement "You may have 250 heavy-duty trucks arriving to your door per month", of course allowing for changes to be made in said contract. Once those 250 heavy-duty trucks actually got rolling, if it became deleterious to the USPS, I can see it being reasonable to change the terms of the contract according to the contract itself.

I'm purposefully arguing for the unpopular side here, btw. I'm definitely in the 99th percentile of bandwidth users and likely on verizon's own enemy's list. I can see it from the other perspective is all.

Once you get into the world networks with multiple OC192 connections all it takes is a little math to show Verizon still makes money from most heavy users. The marginal cost of your 5 to 25MB/s slice of bandwidth you use is just not that expensive especially if they are also selling you cable and or phone service.

PS: For a huge ISP peaking 10mb for 2.4 hours at the worse time of the day is much more costly than a constant 1mb connection 24/7. But, you are not going to see this inter the debate.

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