google has similar issues with some EU providers in particular in france, for youtube.
traditionally the ISP pays to upgrade the pipes for the content that is provided by a third party (ie ISP pays for youtube, netflix traffic). ie the one whos downloading pays for upgrading pipes.
thats where some ISPs (comcast too then i guess?) generally cringe: this way of dividing costs was ok 10 years ago, but not anymore: streaming is 90% of their traffic and its not sustainable.
So it's more like saying "downloading is 90% of their traffic and its not sustainable."
If you're trying to optimize for efficient use of limited bandwidth, unicast transferring of identical content to many many people is pretty wasteful. I think Netflix would argue that network links should be getting bigger and fatter to render the point moot, but given the streams are also getting bigger (we didn't always stream 720p everywhere, did we?) that would certainly take a lot more investment than what's happening now.
The problem is, what happens when you connect a new customer. Well, simple :
1) the income of the ISP increases by some fixed amount
2) the cost of providing this connection increases by n+1 (the number of existing customers)
So here's the catch
np needs to pay for n(n-1)c pipes
Where n is the number of customers on the internet. P is the average income per customer and c is the cost of a pipe that will sustain one customer.
Needless to say, this won't work.
No retail ISP on this planet offers 1:1 ratio like that to its general subscribers.
You can certainly buy uncontended service, but it will start at several hundred dollars per month for about 2 Mbps.
I am fine with getting less than my maximum speed; I understand that the connection is shared and that my neighbors' service can interfere with mine. TCP can deal with congestion. What grinds my gears is that ISPs are not content to sell me a maximum speed; they want to oversubscribe, then claim that they are selling burst service, then call it "unlimited super-awesome Internet!! 15Mbps!!" then penalize customers who fail to limit their use of the supposedly unlimited service.
It's just like the telephone network of yore, no single trunk was ever capacitied to mothers day call traffic - there were reroutes, and more than one path to any large point, so you'd get a lower quality of service, but the traffic would still get thru.
What Comcast is being chastised for, the thing that forced Netflix to transit with them directly, is being paid by its customers to connect to the internet, then refusing to use that money to buy a pipe large enough to deliver that. It wasn't Netflix that wasn't buying a large enough pipe to send its own bits. If Comcast had resolved its disputes with Cogent and widened the pipe to meet the customer demand it's being paid by those customers to meet, I'm sure Netflix would've been happy to stick with its ISP.