Ask HN: Why Doesn’t Amazon Prime Violate Net Neutrality? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why Doesn’t Amazon Prime Violate Net Neutrality?

2 pointsbrightball4 comments

I was talking to someone about this last night and wanted to get input from HN.

When AT&T was offering HBO Max for free as part of your cell package, they weren’t allowed to do it in California due to the California NN.

And I get how that type of bundling violates it…I just don’t understand how Amazon isn’t doing the same thing by including Prime video with a package when they are charging lots of other customers like Netflix for that same bandwidth. It seems like the same thing only the fiber coming out of AWS data centers isn’t treated the same as the fiber on AT&T’s network?

How are these different?

Your understanding of Net Neutrality is largely wrong, and your understanding of what happened vis-a-vis AT&T/California is also wrong.

AT&T are absolutely allowed to bundle HBO Max within plans in California (and do in fact). What they're NOT allowed to do, as an ISP, is treat one downstream provider differently in terms of internet throughput/caps/access/etc. AT&T imposes data caps on all traffic, but then tried to make HBO Max not count towards the data caps like competing streaming services are. This was AT&T using their ISP position via data caps to give their other service an unfair competitive advantage which is unlawful in terms of net neutrality. California rightly squished this.

The Amazon question is predicated on something that never happened (i.e. that AT&T were told to stop bundling HBO Max with phone service), rather than what actually happened (i.e. AT&T were told to treat HBO Max and competitors equally for data cap calculations). Since it never happened, the Amazon Prime question in turn doesn't make sense and NN has nothing to do with bundling.

Amazon does not supply your internet link (cell or otherwise).

Netflix doesn't deliver video via AWS.

In the past it could have been an anti-trust issue. Does the FTC care about this nowadays?

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