• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 5, 2015

"If ISPs are allowed to sell fast lanes, competition for various Internet sites and services will become less about the value of what’s offered and more about who can pay the most to deliver it faster,” Ken Florance, vice president of content delivery, writes today on the company blog. “It would be the very opposite environment than the one the Internet created.” The new blog post comes as the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to issue a vote on new broadband regulations. 

Last year, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed a set of net neutrality regulations that would allow broadband providers to create online fast lanes. But that proposal spurred significant pushback, including criticism by President Obama.

Many of those critics have urged the FCC to scrap Wheeler's original proposal and, instead, classify broadband as a utility service. Doing so would pave the way for the FCC to outlaw paid prioritization deals.

Florance also writes today that the company isn't currently paying for “fast lanes” -- despite the fact that it forged paid-peering deals with Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner last year. The details of those deals haven't been made public, but most observers believe that Netflix is now paying extra fees in order to interconnect directly to the ISPs' networks.

Obviously, that type of arrangement sounds like a “fast lane,” at least according to the ordinary meaning of the words. But Florance defines the concept narrowly. He says that fast lanes only involve prioritized treatment in the “last mile” of data's journey to consumers' homes. Netflix's peering deals involve speedier treatment of material as it moves from Netflix to ISPs, not from ISPs to consumers' homes.

Whether or not those arrangements should be considered fast-lane deals seems open to debate. Regardless of the semantics, Netflix has never been happy about those paid peering deals -- which it forged after consumers complained that they had trouble watching the company's streaming video.

Today, Florance reiterates Netflix's complaints about the paid interconnection arrangements, which he says “stand in contrast to an open Internet and all its promise.”