Have you ever wondered what happens to politicians who go for the brass ring and eat pavement? Of course you haven’t; no one does. It’s like caring about used toilet paper. But what happens is they become lobbyists. And, in the case of Harold Ford Jr. and John Sununu, write idiotic op-ed pieces about how Netflix is getting a “free ride”.
Why would these failures care? Because they work for the astroturfing organization Broadband For America, basically a lobbying organization for your ISP that sees the best way to handle the Internet is to bill you by the minute and cut you off from nasty people who give you things that require lots of streaming over the Internet, thus costing THEM lots of money and keeping them from charging you $10 to rent a movie online. You know, like Netflix.
So, they’re trying to pass Netflix off as “freeloaders” to people who don’t understand how the Internet works, and are insisting that Neflix should write them an $83 million check because your poor starving cable company has to build infrastructure.
“What about all the people who DON’T stream Netflix?!” they whine, as if somehow people who didn’t use Netflix streaming were put under an oppressive yoke. Of course, most of this infrastructure was built in the ’80s, and has already been paid for a thousand times over by cable subscribers, but we can’t expect important has-beens like Sununu and Ford to know that!
Ars Technica lays out in great detail why this is stupid, but in a nutshell, it’s because Netflix isn’t freeloading. Netflix just doesn’t pay cable companies directly: instead they pay companies like Level 3 to handle their Web services. Cable companies are getting paid to stream Netflix. They’re just not getting paid as much as they’d like.
And that, to them, is terrible.