Netflix Had Obligation to Inform Customers of Degraded Service Levels, Says Attorney
The FCC's adoption interconnection rules to give certain parties more favorable interconnection terms would reward behavior that's already proscribed under Section 5 of the FTC Act, said Jonathan Lee, a telecom attorney. Netflix wasn't surprised that its customers experienced degraded…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
service levels as result of its "limiting the number of Comcast interconnection points to which it funneled its traffic," he said. Netflix's decision to limit its number of transit vendors artificially "meant that these vendors' capacity between their networks and Comcast were bound to become overwhelmed, resulting in congestion," he said in a blog post. The commission shouldn’t deceive itself into thinking that "consumer welfare" is served by "preemptively granting concessions to prevent behavior that is otherwise flatly proscribed by existing consumer protection laws," he said. Lee has worked on behalf of AT&T and other competitive and incumbent telecom service providers.