Netflix Suddenly Cares About Net Neutrality Again After Comcast’s Peacock NFL Success

You might recall that back during the net neutrality wars Netflix was a notable supporter of the concept, arguing that big ISPs shouldn't be able to pick and choose winners and losers on their networks, or use their monopoly over broadband access to undermine competition over their networks.

Then, you might recall that as Netflix became bigger and more powerful, it basically stopped caring about the concept, CEO Reed Hastings even going so far as to brush off the Trump administration's fraud prone reversal of the popular rules as largely unimportant to the now-successful company.

Now that the Biden administration is on the cusp of once again restoring the rules, Netflix apparently cares again. Maybe. In a recent filing with the FCC (spotted by Policyband), Netflix noted that net neutrality was important because ISPs are incentivized to abuse a lack of broadband competition to undermine competitors in streaming (duh):

It is very difficult for a person to change ISPs: Switching costs are high and competition is insufficient to thwart non-neutral behavior. If an ISP blocks or throttles content requested by a subscriber, that subscriber cannot immediately access the content from another ISP."

So what got Netflix to care again about a subject it clearly stopped caring about? Apparently it got nervous watching Comcast host its first-ever exclusive NFL game on Peacock a few weekends ago, which it references in the filing both specifically, and more broadly:

Many ISPs have affiliated Pay TV and/or streaming content services that directly compete with independent, online content companies. ISPs with affiliated services have a clear incentive to advantage their affiliated services by either degrading the quality of their competitors' content or increasing their competitors' costs."

That's quite a tonal shift from Hastings' comments back in 2018, when he stated they weren't really worried about it because Netflix was now wealthy enough to afford telecom troll tolls. Since then, Netflix has faced considerably more competition in the streaming space, and has shifted from innovation and disruption to, as all big companies do eventually, nickel-and-diming users and turf protection.

While Netflix's positions here are clearly both vacillating and self serving, that doesn't mean net neutrality still isn't important.

Restoring the Title II classification of ISPs that underpins net neutrality restores the FCC's ability to protect consumers from the monopolistic whims of Comcast or AT&T. And, regardless of the uninformed opinions of folks who don't think that matters, it remains important to have a federal regulator with the authority to meaningfully police bad actors in the very broken U.S. broadband space.

Big ISPs didn't abuse the Trump-era repeal of the rules because they didn't want to violate the numerous state laws that popped up in the wake of the federal repeal. That doesn't mean they still aren't keen to find creative new ways to price gouge consumers or undermine online service competitors, whether it's a giant like Netflix or some smaller company just getting its footing.

That said, I'd still argue that the net neutrality debate at this point tends to obfuscate the real underlying cause of net neutrality, privacy, or other violations in the first place: consolidated telecom monopoly power, the muted competition it creates, and the federal and state corruption that protects it.

Most U.S. lawmakers and regulators (across both parties) not only don't have policy solutions for this problem, they're very often not even capable of admitting the sector's very obvious monopoly/duopoly problem even exists.