Hastings: Comcast wants to become the 'post office'

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings continued to stump against Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable in an appearance at the Code Conference. Hastings accused Comcast of wanting to become the post office, a big national monopoly.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts took his own shots when he took the stage at the Code Conference, saying Netflix just does not want to bear the costs of the massive volume of Internet traffic that its subscribers generate. Netflix paid for postage to ship DVDs to subscribers, it should pay for traffic, Roberts said. "They used to spend three-quarters of a billion dollars for postage," Roberts said.

“It’s a general way of taxing the internet,” Hastings said. “They want the whole internet to pay them for when their subscribers use the internet.” Netflix felt it had no choice to sign a paid peering deal with Comcast earlier this year, holding its nose as it did so in order to ensure that Netflix performance wouldn’t get even worse for Comcast subscribers. Not a lot of money is changing hands right now, but now that the threshold has been crossed, Hastings thinks that the fees will grow over time. “The fundamental question is who’s going to pay for the network? And the answer is the ISP,” Hastings said. Netflix makes up roughly 30 percent of US internet traffic on a given evening, which has led Comcast to suggest that Netflix should bear 30 percent of its costs, he said. And when he suggested that if that’s the case, maybe Netflix should get 30 percent of Comcast’s broadband revenue, Comcast demurred.