SAN FRANCISCO – A judge overseeing a class action lawsuit against a popular DVD rental service, Netflix, suggested yesterday that a proposed settlement be sweetened by making a substantial cut to the more than $2 million in fees sought by the lawyers who brought the case.

“What I am inclined to do on fees is not what class counsel is asking for,” Judge Thomas Mellon of San Francisco Superior Court said toward the end of a three-hour hearing yesterday afternoon. He did not say precisely how much he planned to cut from the $2.1 million sought by the two attorneys who brought the case, Adam Gutride and Seth Safier, but the judge said the award would be “very, very substantially less” than what was requested.

Judge Mellon questioned whether the two men, who have no junior attorneys at their firm, needed to be compensated at $425 to $450 an hour for all the work done on the case. He also suggested that some of the hours spent were due to fixes to the original settlement, which was redrafted after hundreds of class members and the Federal Trade Commission complained that the settlement could act, in essence, as a way to suck Netflix members into a more expensive tier of service.

“In some respects, that work is repairing the levee that shouldn’t have leaked in the first place,” the judge said.

Messrs. Gutride and Safier had agreed to set aside $200,000 of the $2.3 million fee request for the legal fees of those who objected to the settlement, but Judge Mellon said $100,000 would be sufficient to compensate the objecting lawyers. “Some applications are going to get cut way, way down,” the judge said. “There are certainly some fee applications that are going to go down to zero.”

The lawsuit was brought over a Netflix policy of giving the heaviest users of its DVDs-by-mail service slower service and a lower priority on popular movies. The suit contends that Netflix failed to disclose that policy, called “throttling,” to customers. Mr. Gutride asserted yesterday that the company sometimes lied about the policy to customers who inquired about delays.

Netflix maintains that the lawsuit is without merit in part because customers were free to drop the service at any time if they were dissatisfied. However, the company amended its public terms of service last year to disclose the policy and has agreed to settle the case without admitting liability.

The settlement offers current customers a month’s worth of upgraded service. For instance, those who normally can have three movies out at once will be permitted to have four. Former customers will get a three-at-a-time subscription free for one month.

Under the original settlement, customers who took no action after the month would have remained subscribed and billed at the higher level. Under the revised deal, current customers will return to their former level after a month and former customers will be dropped, unless they choose to continue.

Most of those who formally complained about the initial deal, including the Federal Trade Commission, have now withdrawn their objections.

Judge Mellon said the new settlement raised concerns about “distributive justice” because the free benefit to former customers seemed much more valuable than the upgrade for current members. He urged the company, which had agreed to pay up to $2.5 million in legal fees and costs incurred by the plaintiffs, to consider using the money it would save from the lower fee award to improve the benefit for current members.

Lawyers on both sides of the case said former members had a stronger case against the company because they likely quit out of some dissatisfaction. Those who continued despite the diminished service could be seen as consenting to the so-called throttling.

Attorneys for Netflix agreed to consider the proposal to reallocate the legal fees, but the lead plaintiffs’ lawyer on the case, Mr. Gutride, said he had “very significant problems” with the proposal. He argued that it created a conflict of interest between the plaintiffs’ attorneys and their clients in the class.

“No more than you do going in,” Judge Mellon shot back.

Mr. Gutride suggested that one reason to approve the fee request was the fact that only a few of the 5.5 million people in the class wrote in to object to it, but the judge noted that since Netflix agreed to pay any fees up to $2.5 million, there was little reason for class members to object.

“It’s a matter of economic indifference to them,” Judge Mellon said. “It does tend to diminish the vociferousness of the objections. It’s not coming out of their pocket.”

So far, about 418,000 current and former Netflix customers have signed up for the free services.

When Mr. Gutride argued that cutting the legal fees would result in a “windfall” to the company with no guarantee of any benefit to the class, the judge replied, “That’s not my purpose but I understand that’s the necessary result of what I’m saying.”

Judge Mellon said he was not intending to deprecate the work of the lead plaintiffs’ attorneys. He called their effort “long and sustained and of quality,” but said he needed to assess the overall value in light of the benefit to the class.

The judge issued no ruling yesterday on the fees or the settlement, which would apply to Netflix customers nationwide. He said he would schedule another hearing on the case in a few days.

Details about the proposed deal, including sign-up instructions, are available on the Web at www.netflixsettlement.com.