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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

Are the insane? Why would they agree to this weeks after the net neutrality case, and not wait at least until they see what Congress and FCC want to do about it?

The only other explanation is that they may actually like this, because they know it would slow down a lot of their smaller competitors coming after them. It's even stranger when you think that customers must've blamed Comcast for their poor Netflix experience lately, not Netflix.

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How would Net Neutrality help here? Comcast wasn't throttling Netflix vs. other content, they were refusing to build bigger pipes to Cogent.

It looks like Comcast was refusing to upgrade specifically to hurt Netflix, which falls under the sprit of net neutrality if not the letter.

Equivalently, they were refusing to upgrade specifically to help Netflix.

Comcast customers are paying for uncongested paths to the whole Internet, not just 70% of it.

Does that include the Galapagos islands or a server in someone's garage that gets slashdotted?

You can't really guarantee uncongested paths at all times to the "whole Internet".

Net Neutrality requires that you treat all traffic the same, regardless of source/destination - it certainly doesn't require that you create larger connections without being paid for them.

And, let's face it - anybody who has ever used Cogent for transit (usually at 1/3 to 1/10th the cost of other providers) knew what they were getting into.

I don't think Cogent's cheapness has much to do with it. When Netflix was using Tata, Comcast refused to upgrade their Tata links. When Netflix used Level 3, Comcast found a way to create congestion there.

> The only other explanation is that they may actually like this, because they know it would slow down a lot of their smaller competitors coming after them.

There ya go.

Netflix could also be seeing declining engagement or subscription metrics for customers on Comcast.

I already had thoughts of dropping netflix due to their streaming quality. It's gotten so bad in the last three or four months that it was like I regressed to watching downloaded xvid's.

Because their business cannot wait...

It's like a hostage situation; you say "yeah I don't negotiate with terrorists" but when you see your wife/kid/so threatened and the money is just there in the bank it's hard to hold on to that posture...

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