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Some observations about this:

For me, it's getting stuff from https://*.cogeco.isp.nflxvideo.net -- which indicates my ISP (Cogeco) is part of their Open Connect [1] program with an on-network netflix cache.

Other people are reporting downloads from https://*.ix.nflxvideo.net, which appears to be the Netflix cloud infrastructure.

It downloads data from 5 URLs every time, but their sizes fluctuate, something like ~25MB, ~25MB, ~20MB, ~2.2MB, ~1.2MB.

The contents of each response appears to be the same (though truncated at a difference place), with the beginning starting with:

    5d b9 3c a9 c3 b4 20 30  b9 bc 47 06 ab 63 22 11
`file` doesn't recognize what this is.

----

Since it's https, ISPs shouldn't be able to easily game this (eg: make this go fast, but still throttle video content).

So one potential way would be to only start throttling after 25MB is downloaded (or after a connection is open for ~2 minutes): does anyone know how Netflix actually streams? If they have separate HTTP sessions for 'chunks' of a video, then presumably this wouldn't work.

They could see if a user visits fast.com and then unthrottle for some amount of time. I'm not sure if ISPs have the infrastructure to do a complex rule like this though (anyone know?). I also think this would be relatively easy for users to notice (anytime they visit fast.com, their netflix problems disappear for a while) and there would be a pretty big backlash about something so blatant.

[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/




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