Comparison Between Comcast And Netflix

The question of who has rights to control what data flows thought the Internet and at what speed has been a question discussed within the US government since the late 1990's.(Gans, 2014 p. 183) The question has been should the internet providers be required to treat all data on their infrastructure as equivalent or should they be given the ability to prioritize some data types or sources over others. There have been several key decisions over the last 20 years and so far the US government and the FCC have stayed fairly consistent in their opinions and rulings, but the Internet providers are trying to make changes. Net neutrality is a vague term that can cover many aspects of the Internet itself, the service providers, content providers and
Netflix was about 30% of Comcast's traffic. Comcast also was spinning up a movie streaming service. What was suspected and Comcast eventually admitted to was slowing down the Netflix traffic on their infrastructure to unusable rates. This was a huge win for Comcast at first. The consumer sees most of their Internet traffic running normally but Netflix is slow.(Key, 2010) So the Comcast customer calls Netflix and complains and starts to look for other options. Comcasts's movie streaming works very well when the customer tries it out as Comcast puts their streaming traffic in-front of everything else on the network. This went on for some time as it is very difficult to detect and prove, but Comcast got even more greedy and went to Netflix and told them what they were doing.(Key, 2010) They told Netflix in order to be given access to their infrastructure, they would need to pay a premium to the tune of millions of dollars a year. Netflix first took them to court but eventually paid why the court case was pending so their Comcast customers could continue to work.(Healey,
The largest of these ways is its penetration into everyday life for nearly everyone. When the Internet was only for the exchange of ideas, hiccups, outages, and unreliably had little impact on society as a whole. The Internet now is a requirement for the world to function. The FCC's job now is to make sure that the ISP's have tools to maintain an infrastructure that provides services such as banking, governmental communication, monitoring other critical pieces of infrastructure such as the power grid. But they must not prioritize that communication over any other communication.(Wong 2015 p.