We told you a few weeks ago about a new plan by Comcast to go head-to-head with Netflix over streaming. The deal is that if you are a Comcast cable subscriber, you can now run Comcast’s Xfinity service through your Xbox (I suppose you have to be an Xbox owner too) and watch a selection of streaming movies and TV shows. That content will NOT count against any kind of limit you have on your home Internet from Comcast. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has taken to Facebook to say that’s dirty pool and is a violation of the principles of net neutrality, in that it favors content from one source – which is the same as the service provider – over another source.
If I watch last night’s SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn’t use up my cap at all.
The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment.
In what way is this neutral?
You can’t really argue that the letter of the law refutes this, since it’s not the Internet that the content is traveling over, it’s just cable routed through an Xbox.
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