Anne Marie Squeo, formerly managing director of communications firm 30 Point Communications has joined Netflix as director of corporate communications. She replaces Joris Evers, who is moving to Europe as VP, communications. (Netflix announced last week that it will launch streaming services in six more European countries later this year).
Squeo will work out of both the D.C. office and Netflix's Los Gatos headquarters. Jonathan Friedland, Netflix chief communications officer, told B&C that like Evers, Squeo will help out on the network neutrality front. Before her corporate communications career with various companies, Squeo was a journalist with Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, where she shared a Pulitzer prize for national reporting.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has said that ISP peering arrangements were outside the scope of the FCC's new open Internet order--the FCC is trying to reinstate rules thrown out by the court. But in a speech to the Progressive Policy Institute last week, Wheeler chief of staff Ruth Milkman indicated that could change. Netflix has argued that peering does have net neutrality implications.
She cited disputes between Comcast and Level 3 in 2010, and Comcast, Cogent and Verizon earlier this year, and said the FCC did not have the answer to whether those were business negotiations that the marketplace was resolving, or signs of a breakdown in interconnection and traffic exchanges on the Internet.
Netflix has complained that it was essentially forced into a paid peering arrangement with Comcast, while the cable op has said Netflix was the one who wanted to cut out the middleman and deal directly.
Milkman said that Internet interconnection was outside the scope of the 2010 open Internet order, but only outside the "proposed" scope of the 2014 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. She pointed out that some parties have sought to expand the scope of the 2014 network neutrality rule effort to include Internet backbone issues like traffic exchanges and peering. She said the FCC will vet those comments and "learn from [them]."
