

Ask HN: What if ISPs throttled Google's services? - cordite

With the advent of Comcast wringing money out of Netflix, why don&#x27;t they hit on other players like Google with YouTube?
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iSloth
There's a few ways to look at this.

1) They already do, it's true there are some ISP's out there that are actively
limiting traffic to Google services, having said that this is almost
exclusively their YouTube content. When the same limits are applied for
Netflix they are much more damaging as users are actually paying to watch that
content, where as YouTube it's free, so it's annoying for the customer but
their not really wasting money on a service that they can't use.

2) Caching; both Youtube[1] and Netflix [2] offer free on-site caching
services for their video content.

From personal experience the Google cache is very effective at reducing
traffic in your core network. It seems that even though Youtube has thousands
of Videos in it's library the majority of traffic at anyone time is probably
going to a very small selection of this total library, and therefore you get
an excellent caching hit rate with only a few small servers.

Netflix on the other hand has a bigger problem, their library is also huge
however users randomly select what they want to watch and they have to pre-
transcode videos into hundreds of different formats for all of the possible
devices out there, meaning they have loads of copies of the same film in
different resolutions and formats. For the ISP this means you have to have a
fairly constant stream of data coming into your network from Netflix just to
keep the cache updated, not so effective especially for the smaller ISP's.

[1] -
[https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html](https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html)
[2] -
[https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect](https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect)

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ScottWhigham
They already do. Google had/has a whole education site based on finding out
whether your ISP was blocking/throttling.

[http://www.measurementlab.net/](http://www.measurementlab.net/) (Google is
heavily involved)

[http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/](http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/)
(although this page's "venom" has been taken down in recent years)

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PaulHoule
Maybe they already do. I find Youtube less reliable than Netflix, Hulu, Amazon
and those sorts of services.

