Netflix Inc. May Have Found the Magic Bullet to Kill Comcast's Connection Fees
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With no Net Neutrality, what's to prevent Comcast from blocking P2P traffic? They already like data caps, they could also shrink the upload cap to make it too expensive for users to be able to afford.
Then you have the catalog problem. That works well for when the new episode of Orange is the New Black comes out, but what about smaller shows and old movies that may only have a half-dozen people watching them at any given time?
I'd say Netflix's best chance in all this is to mobile their customers to complain to regulators with some sort of banner in the Netflix apps.
Remember when the internet blacked its self out for a day a year or two ago over Net Neutrality? Remember how big companies like Comcast complained that Google and Facebook and others were "cheating" in getting users to complain about the issue?
That's where their power lies. Netflix has a ton of users. Either doing that or putting up messages during buffering like "Having problems? Comast isn't working hard for you." from time to time.
Encryption.
> but what about smaller shows and old movies that may only have a half-dozen people watching them at any given time?
A user could distribute things that they're not watching.
> I'd say Netflix's best chance in all this is to mobile their customers to complain to regulators with some sort of banner in the Netflix apps.
That's a good idea too.
Let's face it: almost everything an average internet user does, measured by number of packets, is on 80 or 443 (except bittorrent, but comcast very likely already deprioritizes that.) Maybe a sprinkling of email traffic here and there for the few who don't use a web mail provider. I'd actually be quite shocked if Comcast didn't have traffic shaping in place that deprioritized non-web traffic. It would make smart business sense.
Which means the only way Netflix could do P2P is to put peers behind port 443, which can only work for one connection per peer. (And good luck teaching all netflix subscribers how to get NAT working on their routers.) Or they'd have to do a nat busting service, which wouldn't be peer to peer any more, and would open them right back up to Comcast's throttling.
At the end of the day, if nobody's forcing Comcast to stay neutral, they can deprioritize whatever traffic they want. Who's going to stop them? What are you going to do, sign up for a competing ISP?
Suppose you'd do it really, really simple. If you watch a netflix show, you download an encrypted version, and start serving it on your IP address on ports 80 and 443, http and https (wouldn't work with NAT of course, but ...). Then inform central servers that this link exists and the central server tells 1/10000 of next requests to download it from you. Now split up the files into 1000 pieces each, and make it work like that. It could take care of tracerouting to everyone and try to "group" requests with the most overlapping traceroutes.
Bittorrent is a brutally simple protocol, compared to it's predecessors, and I'd say, even compared to things like http and https. Running bittorrent over http or https would not be very hard.
Keep in mind that there's also an advantage for the providers. What the providers really want is payment for building network infrastructure. Given how hard that is becoming, and the fact that it's not linear (for linearly increasing endpoints and bandwidth you need exponentially increasing network equipment and transfer lines), they should be ecstatic about efforts to turn traffic back as soon in their network as possible, it would offload their core networks, and they can sure use that.
Contrary to what people think here, in most cases ISPs only throttle p2p traffic either between their distribution and core layers, or between their core and peering (second makes more sense financially, but it may not be the same organization). So p2p traffic between you and your neighbor is not throttled at all. This is done because firewalls that can reliably separate p2p traffic from other traffic are expensive, so one tries to avoid sending all core traffic through them. Throttling p2p in the access servers is quite expensive, and will give customers (even more) the impression that their line is throttled at all times.
(also in most ISPs even a basic business connection will bypass p2p throttles, given that the cost difference between customer connections and basic business connections is little or nonexistent these days, you may want to consider switching)
Shifting all the traffic to P2P most likely would send Netflix traffic back into the overloaded slow lanes again - and if anything makes it all the MORE likely to be further slowed down and deprioritised for reasons. Phrases like "Internet traffic of a type often used for piracy" are all that needs to be said to justify whatever further shaping, blocking, and other indignities could be applied to it.
Or netflix could use anonymous ip's/domains for their servers --who says netflix needs to broadcast to comcast--hey it's me netflix sharing some movies w/ my customers, thanks!
What Netflix neet do do is to use some smart protocol like utp and have sane limits by default to not saturate the uplink and make other services slow. If they manage to do that, then most users will be happy. Slap in there an on/off checkbox and a manual bandwidth limiter for the advanced users, and even most of those that know how p2p works will not complain.