Netflix Is the Culprit

[Commentary] About that Netflix flip-flop, it’s worse than you think.

On Jan. 14, 2014, the DC circuit court threw out an existing network neutrality rule put in place by the Federal Communications Commission, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings rushed to assure investors the ruling was a nonevent. In the absence of an official net neutrality rule, the likelihood of broadband operators blocking access or slowing down Netflix was nil. “Part of delivering and expanding [the broadband business] for consumers,” he explained, “is having a really good Netflix experience, a good YouTube experience. That’s why people get higher-speed broadband. So I think actually our economic interests are pretty co-aligned.”

People, this has been the adult view of net neutrality all along, and why intelligent persons have rightly called federal regulation a solution in search of a problem. Then why, a month after this deluge of demurrers, did Netflix change its tune radically and call for utility regulation of even the upstream “network of networks,” which previously had not been considered part of the net neutrality debate? Because Netflix was then rolling out its own network, Open Connect, to bypass the public network in favor of direct tie-ups with last-mile providers like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T.