David Weinberg

What Netflix's high volume has to do with net neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission voted to open its latest net neutrality proposal to public comments. FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has said the commission is "dedicated to protecting and preserving an open Internet." Much of the debate around the current proposal has focused on the agreement between Netflix and Comcast, in which Netflix pays extra to guarantee its content is delivered to homes without delay.

Netflix accounts for about a third of peak-period broadband traffic. So what does that mean for the net neutrality debate? "I don't think it matters," says Barbara van Schewick, faculty director of the Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School, "because under a good network neutrality regime, people pay for the bandwidth they use and it doesn't really matter where it comes from."