Thanks to new law, Netflix adds Facebook sharing features. Congress passed the VPPA in 1988 after the Washington City Paper published a list of videotape rentals by Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork during his contentious nomination process.
Although Bork's rental history was mostly innocuous, members of Congress were outraged at the breach of privacy. Netflix and other companies argued the law was outdated and that users should be able to share their viewing habits with their friends without having to manually approve each video. Netflix & VPPA. Streaming video service Netflix recently appealed to a panel of U.S. senators to update an old law that forbids the company from launching a Facebook application within the country.
The antiquated law, the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), prohibits companies like Netflix from sharing a person’s movie-rental history. The law was passed in 1988 after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental records were published in a news publication. At the time, the law seemed to make sense because a person’s video rental history does have the potential to affect public opinion about that person — especially when running for public office or being nominated for a public position. Netflix criticizes new Internet billing by bits. Posted at 12:35 PM ET, 07/08/2011 Jul 08, 2011 04:35 PM EDT TheWashingtonPost Netflix said Friday that moves by Internet service providers to charge users by the amount of data they use could end up costing consumers more.
In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Netflix General Counsel David Hyman, wrote that new data tiers by ISPs such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon don’t reflect how much it costs to actually increase bandwidth on networks.