That has never been how the internet works. You pay a part of the costs, the other party pay a part of the cost. When the other side opts for a cheap, poor quality connection (like Cogent), you suffer no matter how much you pay, and it's not your ISPs fault.

It's not Comcasts responsibility if Cogent did not have peering arrangement or had paid for sufficient capacity to handle their end of the connection, that their customer was paying them to provide.

If it was, I'd love to provide Netflix connection much cheaper than Cogent. I'll provide it over my 10Mbps uplink, and blame consumers ISPs when everything falls over.

It is Comcast's responsibility because I was paying them $1xx a month to take care of it. Bulk transit bandwidth is significantly cheaper than the price I was paying, so there's no justifying the claim that both sides have to pay.

Cool, let's be partners. I'll provide a service you want to access at 10Gbps, for an hour a week. I've got no connections to Comcast. I'll call up my brother, who runs a little ISP. I buy 10Gbps from him, and so have 5 other customers. You try to access my site. Packet loss ensues.

Since you've paid Comcast, they're now required to go to my brother's ISP and arrange more peering, right? Also, since you're paying, I shouldn't have to pay my brother, and he shouldn't have to pay anyone else, right?

Come to think of it, why isn't all hosting bandwidth free? Why do Azure and AWS charge for outbound bandwidth, but not inbound?

Let's bring this down to earth. You're confusing transit and peering connections.

Netflix pays level3 for transit service (you pay your brother). Comcast pays level3 (your brother) for transit service. Notice how level3 is neither the source nor the destination of the traffic.

Netflix's traffic increases from, for example, 500Gbps to 1Tbps. Comcast's level3 ports fill up because netflix increased in popularity.

In general networks that pass a lot of traffic like this end up peering directly and avoiding transit costs.

Comcast has two choices. They can either pay level3 for another 500Gbps or they can transition the full 1Tbps to free peering directly with netflix. And yes, I consider it Comcast's responsibility to do one of those two things with their subscriber revenue, which, incidentally, most other ISPs in the US are doing.

Instead they are choosing option 3 which is, leverage their local access monopoly to force netflix to pay them, and protect their cable and xfinity services.

Sure, if your brother's ISP has a 50Gbps pipe at a common peering location, and 10,000 Comcast customers all want 5Mbps video streams from his customers, Comcast should be peering with him.