Letter Sent to Netflix; Terms of Service Excerpt (Score 3, Interesting)

My wife and I have been using Netflix since Nov. 2004, and we have experienced a marked decline in service over that time. Having just learned about the "throttling", we sent them the following letter:

I have just been alerted to your new changes in the "Terms of Service" regarding heavy users. Personally, I am appalled by the intent and also the wording of this recent change.

Perhaps you have serious abusers of your system, but my husband and I are teachers who work 12 hour days. Watching movies is one of our only luxuries. We have seen our level of service go down significantly since we signed on with Netflix. Now we understand why.

After reading some enlightening articles about Netflix and its practices, we will be seriously considering whether or not to keep our relationship with you.

Most importantly, we will no longer be suggesting your service to family and friends, which we have done many times in the past. Instead, we will be sending copies of the articles concerning your business practices to family and friends who already have the service so that they might be aware of what's going on.

For what it's worth: We would have been happy to pay a reasonable surcharge in months when we rented more DVDs. What your company has chosen to do instead is offensive and insulting.

Here are some eye-opening parts of their terms of use:

We make no guaranty as to the shipping and delivery of DVDs and may, in our sole and absolute discretion, change our business practice regarding allocation, delivery and shipping, without notice. We may from time to time revise these Terms of Use but we will not necessarily provide you notice of the revisions. It is up to you to review the Terms of Use frequently to determine if there have been changes.

They send us emails about everything else...but they can't bother letting us know when the terms of use have changed? Something smells bad here...