I've been throttled.

After years of being a Netflix member who rented what I'd estimate to be one DVD every two months, I recently started becoming a more active member. For the past three months or so, I'd been pushing my two-DVDs-at-a-time plan to the limit, probably cycling through 1.5 DVDs per week (my husband and I are catching up on the brilliant but not a little bit sexist "Rescue Me").

When I first started cranking out the rentals, I was astonished at how quickly they came. It was essentially a two-day turnaround: one day to get back to their facility, they shipped out my next flick that day, it arrived the day after.

After awhile, though, the pace slowed. It would take two or even three days to get a confirmation email that they'd received my returned disk, and the new one often wouldn't arrive the day after the email.

At first I thought I was imaging it. Had I just been misremembering the speed of my earlier rentals? But some poking around revealed that this slowing down is an intentional practice by Netflix that critics have labeled "throttling".  Essentially,  Netflix  bumps frequent users to the back of the queue when it helps them to more quickly service infrequent customers; because those infrequent customers cost Netflix very little but pay their monthly fees anyway, it's important to Netflix to keep them happy.

I actually don't have a problem with this. It's not entirely a clear line: I'd raise holy hell if someone tried to rearrange customers waiting in line at, say, Panera, and I was strongly opposed to the proposal to allow people to buy their way into faster TSA lines at the airport, but for some reason this doesn't disturb me at all. Although if the service gets even slower, I might just cancel.