Netflix double standard: Free for me if everybody else pays

[Commentary] As soon as Netflix reached a transit agreement with Comcast, Netflix piggybacked on the network neutrality debate and announced that transit should be free for content providers.

It argued that all traffic should be treated the same, regardless of the costs it imposes on networks. Netflix wants to ensure that someone else pays for the high-definition video infrastructure it needs to realize its business, even though its traffic is the leading source of the congestion.

Not wanting its own customers to be adversely impacted, Netflix calls for the socialization of upgrade costs to all the users in the network, even if they don’t subscribe to Netflix.

[Layton is a PhD fellow at the Center for Communication, Media, and Information Studies at Aalborg University in Denmark]