Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

> > in an attempt to force them to host their servers for free
>
> These are the OpenConnect caching boxes, I assume?  If that's the case, it's
> incorrect to say that Netflix "refuses to allow [...] caching", simply that
> they prefer to provide caching their way.  As it stands, I don't see the
> problem with running Netflix cacheboxes instead of your own -- if you *were*
> running the cache, you would presumably need to pay for hosting anyway (and
> also machines), so I'm not sure how OpenConnect is worse.  If there are 
> reasons why OpenConnect boxes *are* inferior to some other solution (such as
> if they take up 20 times the power and space of an equivalent caching
> solution), then those are what need to be talked about.

One could make a somewhat valid argument that the “OpenConnect” caches are
limited to caching Netflix and thus not very “open” whereas a cache that I
was hosting for myself could cache a variety of content sources and not just
Netflix.

Would it really be plausible for a small ISP to host caching clusters for
every streaming content supplier out there?

Don’t get me wrong, I think that the access networks are the ones that are failing
their customers in this scenario over all, but I can see this one valid aspect
to the argument above.

Owen