The heat of high summer is a great time to stay inside and marathon a million hours of TV. But for some Netflix customers who use Verizon as their ISP, the summer streaming season is a slow and choppy dud. Even though the two companies came to a paid peering arrangement earlier this year, service is still going from bad to worse. Netflix blames Verizon, Verizon blames Netflix, and while service is still cooling down, their very public fight is heating up. Back in June, Netflix tried showing users a message blaming ISPs for their crappy connections to the service. Verizon shot back with a cease and desist, and not long afterward the messages stopped. This week, Verizon went one step farther with a lengthy blog post about the “congestion myth.”
For the most part, users are unaware of the scale and complexity that is the internet. This isn’t a bad thing, either. We pay for a service, and it’s the responsibility of the company we’re doing business with to deliver that service. When it comes to a service like Netflix, we’re paying for a service that requires another service in order to function. It’s Netflix’s job to provide the content for us to choose, and it’s our ISP’s job to deliver it. What most people don’t know is that there’s actually a ton of stuff happening in between these two steps, and it’s that invisible part of the internet that Verizon and Netflix can’t seem to cooperate on. Verizon published a post on their Public Policy blog today, and they did a great job breaking down how this invisible part of the internet works. In doing so, they also made sure to blame Netflix at every turn for the problems that their customers are experiencing. The purpose of the post was to demonstrate how they are not deliberately throttling Netflix through some artificial means, and that’s a true statement. Verizon is not deliberately slowing Netflix down by some artificial bottleneck in software. Instead, they see that there is a physical bottle next between the edge of their network and choose to do nothing about it.
