Skip to footer

Is Verizon 'waging war' on Netflix? Not so fast.

A tech expert has alleged that Verizon is throttling bandwidth to users of certain cloud platforms. Verizon denies the charges. 

|
AP
The Verizon sign at New Meadowlands Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.
  • By Matthew Shaer Correspondent

According to tech expert David Raphael, Verizon is intentionally throttling the bandwidth of big cloud services, such as Amazon's AWS. 

Here's some background: Earlier this month, Mr. Raphael, who uses AWS, noticed a marked slowdown in his Wi-fi connection. After conducting a handful of tests, Raphael reached out to a customer service rep from Verizon. The rep then allegedly admitted to Raphael that Verizon was providing "limited bandwidth to cloud providers." Finally, Raphael asked if the throttling was impacting the quality of Netflix streaming; the rep answered in the affirmative. 

"In my personal opinion, this is Verizon waging war against Netflix," Raphael wrote on his blog. "Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure is hosted on AWS. That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this." (Netflix relies especially heavily on Amazon's AWS.) 

Verizon has since issued a statement saying that it treats "all traffic equally." 

"Many factors can affect the speed of a customer’s experience for a specific site, including that site’s servers, the way the traffic is routed over the Internet and other considerations," the statement continues. "We are looking into this specific matter, but the company representative was mistaken. We’re going to redouble our representative education efforts on this topic."

Unsurprisingly, the news, which comes in the wake of a big legal victory for Internet providers, has a lot of net-neutrality activists worried about a nefarious corporate throttling plot. But as Peter Bright of Ars Technica notes, we shouldn't jump to any conclusions, especially since "customer service reps are pretty much the last people who would know about such a policy, let alone be able to inform customers of it." 

Meanwhile, over at InformationWeek, columnist Jonathan Feldman encourages doomsayers to "simmer down" – there are enough checks and balances (both digital and legal), he argues, that carriers will never be able to really throttle traffic. At least not in the long term. 

"The bottom line is this: Even if Verizon or any other carrier hasn't tried to impede bandwidth-hogging traffic in this post-Net-neutrality world, the carriers will likely experiment with it," he writes. "Would they be wolves if they left lambs alone? But they're not going to be able to get away with it because testing is relatively easy, content providers have deep pockets, and we have antitrust laws that address anticompetitive behavior." 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Is Verizon 'waging war' on Netflix? Not so fast.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2014/0206/Is-Verizon-waging-war-on-Netflix-Not-so-fast.
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe