Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

Re:Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days by fragmede on Thursday March 19, 2020 @06:26PM (#22632411)

I'm not sure that's (entirely) it. I don't know if this is why Netflix doesn't do it, but Germany doesn't have the same First Amendment laws as the US. In particular, there are some writings that are illegal under German law. Thus, locating a box in Germany that could potentially hold material that is illegal under German law is ill advised. That the box is operating simply as a local cache doesn't seem to change the lawyer's perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re-unifi...

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Re:Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days by aeyes on Thursday March 19, 2020 @09:22PM (#22633623)

Akamai has hundrads of cache boxes at German ISPs, including at this one.

There are some issues at play here:

1. This ISP in particular has extremely weird peering rules, they only do paid private peering (more expensive than other transit providers) and even deny access to Tier 1 networks. For a long time YouTube was almost unusable due to weird routing - they even had a website explaining why YouTube was broken (Google doesn't want to pay crycry). Same with several popular gameservers. Due to their market position they are completely fine with being the bully.

2. They have their own streaming and TV offer so they don't have many reasons for making the Netflix experience better.

This information might be outdated, I don't live in Germany anymore and it seems that they now have some sort of partnership with Netflix.

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