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They pay transit providers to do it. Except with Comcast, who they pay directly. And save a lot of money by doing so.
by Touche 13y ago
They pay transit providers to do it. Except with Comcast, who they pay directly. And save a lot of money by doing so.
- mikeash 13y agoPreviously, they paid transit providers for everything, but Comcast wouldn't allow them access to their network at sufficient speeds, so they were forced into paying Comcast directly. In other words, we're already in the double-dipping situation I'm decrying. The "we each pay our ISPs" scenario that I described and that you quoted is now, sadly, a hypothetical.
- Touche 13y agoComcast and Cogent disagreed on who should burden the costs. Because of this Netflix went around Cogent and are doing it themselves, and saving a lot of money by doing so. Now they are using the biased tech media to create a campaign whereby they will lower their costs even further and shift them onto others (including you and me).
- elq 13y agoYou keep saying that Netflix is saving money. Please provide a reference for this.
- mikeash 13y agoNetflix went around Cogent because Cogent couldn't get Comcast to bump up their peering capacity. Comcast wouldn't bump up their peering capacity because they're a monopoly in many places and have no incentive to improve. In a reasonable free market, none of this discussion would matter. The agreements would all shake themselves out in the marketplace. But give a company a monopoly and suddenly they're not subject to the same forces. Between Netflix, Cogent, and Comcast, only one of them is a monopoly.