Economy
Related: About this forumNetflix warns ISPs: We値l mobilize our 44 million customers if you slow down our streams
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/23/netflix-preps-customer-base-as-their-army-in-a-war-over-net-neutrality/Netflix warns ISPs: Well mobilize our 44 million customers if you slow down our streams
By George Chidi
Thursday, January 23, 2014 9:26 EST
You want a war? We have the bigger army.
This is Netflix message to shareholders, customers and the Internet service providers ready to charge content streaming firms a higher rate for bandwidth than other customers, in a shareholder letter released Wednesday, a week after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the FCCs long-standing network neutrality rules for cable service providers.
In principle, a domestic ISP now can legally impede the video streams that members request from Netflix, degrading the experience we jointly provide, wrote Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, in the quarterly shareholder letter. The motivation could be to get Netflix to pay fees to stop this degradation. Were this draconian scenario to unfold with some ISP, we would vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open Internet they are paying their ISP to deliver.
Netflix, the letter notes, currently has more than 44 million members, 33 million of whom live in the U.S. Strong subscriber growth drove Netflix share prices up 16 percent Wednesday afternoon.
merrily
(45,251 posts)customers anyway.
liberal N proud
(60,336 posts)Netflix, Amazon and other businesses who have built their model on high speed internet access.
Demit
(11,238 posts)yeoman6987
(14,449 posts)That surprises me. I need to know your thoughts.
We don't want ISPs to determine which legal services we are allowed to access and which we are not. Neither do we want them to artificially degrade the performance of a legal service we want to consume.
Liberalynn
(7,549 posts)whether there would be a strong pushback from other businesses and consumers(once more become aware of the potential impact)? I'm hoping Verizon may have won the court battle only to have their sheer greed cost them far more in the public perception of them, thus costing them customers, than whatever they thought they were going to gain by picking this fight in the first place. I have a year left on my contract wit them, then I'm switching to a Trac phone.
TreasonousBastard
(43,049 posts)because I have no, nada, zilch, options besides Cablevision for internet access.
Progressive dog
(6,905 posts)of course only if the video is provided by Netflix.
GOTV
(3,759 posts)Those are extremely popular services that have the resources to fight back.
The real loss is the new services you will never see because they can't raise the funds to assure access to their product.
onehandle
(51,122 posts)You better believe I will notice a slowdown.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)truedelphi
(32,324 posts)truedelphi
(32,324 posts)Oh that's right, they probably are busy lining their pockets to NOT deal with this travesty of the free internet being ended.