throttling

Just as some rent-a-truck companies will not allow you to drive faster than 55 mph, so do telcos and cable companies restrict the maximum speed of your DSL or modem connection to conserve their network bandwidth.

Historical perspective: In a stunning admission in 2016, Netflix confessed to "throttling" according to The Washington Post. The company acknowledged that it had been automatically capping video quality at 600 Kbps for AT&T and Verizon mobile customers for the past five years to prevent those customers from blowing past their mobile data limits, which would presumably prevent them from watching more Netflix. A speed connection of about 3,000 Kbps is preferable for watching a movie in standard definition on a mobile device. Netglix has fiercely criticized ISPs in recent years for alleged throttling and has pressed for strong net neutrality rules. But then appeared that even as the company asked regulators to ban throttling by carriers, it had no qualms about doing it themselves.