This is a big change of course for Netflix. Though the company was one of the firmest net neutrality support back in 2014 — during the last argument over net neutrality — it hasn’t cared quite as much this time around. During March, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told in the News that he’s “not too worried” about what’ll become of net neutrality since it didn’t pose a big risk to his company. And just a few weeks ago, Hastings told Recode that net neutrality is “not our primary battle at this point.”
Hastings was pretty honest about why that was the case: “It’s not almost important to us because we’re big enough to get the deals we want,” he said.
A spokesperson for Netflix said our characterization of today’s business as a “big change” was “a bit hyperbolic” and that its position had been more nuanced. Hastings told Recode, for example, that that the company would be willing to assist lobbying efforts, which the Battle for the Net Neutrality certainly falls under.
“It’s true the weakening of US net neutrality laws will unlikely actually impact Netflix’s business or service, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without an open internet,” the spokesperson wrote. “There are other organizations for whom this is a bigger issue, and we support strong net neutrality protections to guarantee the next Netflix has a fair shot to go the extent.”
Netflix is arguably one of the greatest success stories that came from having an open internet. Internet providers surely could have made growth much harder for Netflix when it was starting out. At the time, Netflix would have been too little to cut deals that put it on equal footing with a company like HBO or YouTube, which had Google at its back. But because all US internet subscribers had unencumbered access to Netflix, it didn’t have to worry about that, and it popped into the streaming giant it is today.
Given Hastings’ many ambivalent comments about net neutrality throughout the year, this tweet isn’t something we should necessarily take as a powerful call to action. But we’ll get a better sense of how Netflix is taking the fight next month. It’s now signed on to participate in the Battle for the Net protest, which will have dozens of web companies protesting in support of net neutrality on July 12th.
It’s not clear what any of these organizations will do just yet. Last time around, during a 2014 protest organized by the same group, websites including Kickstarter, Tumblr, and Reddit filled their sites with spinning wheels indicating that they were taking forever to load.
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