Why Carriers Won't Win War On Netflix

[Commentary] It was only a matter of time. The simmer surrounding the hyped "death of Net neutrality" escalated to a boil when a blogger who works for a cloud startup claimed that Verizon is now using the opportunity to "wage war against Netflix" and other content providers. To be fair, it's not entirely clear whether the blogger was experiencing peering congestion or true rate limiting. You can't tell without more rigorous testing than the blogger was able to do. But under-the-covers traffic management is a common practice of any network operator.

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. 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. And so begins another arms race. Settle down for amusing and interesting times. Just know that the Internet ain't melting down anytime soon.

[Feldman is Chief Information Officer for the City of Asheville (NC)]