In other words, the company has increased U.S. Internet use by a third — on its own — in an extremely short amount of time. Be careful here. While Netflix migh

In other words, the company has increased U.S. Internet use by a third — on its own — in an extremely short amount of time. Be careful here. While Netflix might command nearly a third of internet traffic at a given time, does not mean that it INCREASED consumption 30%. This conclusion precludes the possibility that this is a traffic increase and not a redistribution. While I would certainly wager that Netflix has increased the overall amount of internet traffic and bandwith, I would be dubious on the fact that if it were never to have been created traffic would be 30% less. Likely, people would be using other substitutes like similar sites, or even completely different websites. The interesting thing about this time in history is that everything is a substitute. When you do something in the consumer space you are competing for peoples time. Video games, netflix, television, reading books, surfing reddit, all these things are in competition for time. So while netflix commands 30% of traffic, it is likely that if it did not exist people would still be using the internet in some capacity, maybe ultimately consuming less bandwith, but possibly not 30% less.