I don't know about bad publicity though. To each customer support call simply say, Comcast has broken their contract with our CDN. Please call comcast. Considering Comcast is one of the two most hated companies in America right now, by a _huge_ margin, people will easily believe that, especially since in this case, it would be true. Level3 et all are enabling this behavior.

> Considering Comcast is one of the two most hated companies in America right now, by a _huge_ margin

And Time Warner is the second: http://bgr.com/2014/05/20/comcast-twc-customer-satisfaction-...

Nobody likes the cable companies. It would be very easy for someone to capitalize on that hatred to win public support for net neutrality; it's just a matter of crafting the right campaign.

This is why I'm so disappointed to see the small-medium ISPs hop right in bed with Comcast and co-sign anti-net neutrality letters:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/05/top-isps-threaten-to...

With the national attention this issue is getting, this is a tremendous marketing opportunity to take customers away from the big dogs.

The smaller ISPs are just following Comcast's example: "You mean we can charge multiple times for the same data without doing any extra work? Sign us up!" All last-mile ISPs will eventually realize they can hold everyone hostage, so long as there is no significant competition.

Small ISPs also like this because they typically are very heavy on paid, private internet and don't do much peering due to having small, localized networks. They stand to gain, proportionally, the most since they can charge the people the were previously paying for access.

Local Television stations and sports teams have successfully used this as a way to get cable companies to fold over contracts for carriage.

Everyone despises cable companies, most of the angst would go their way. After all, 9/10 people don't know what a CDN is!

Support calls from whom? CDNs effectively sit behind the Comcast site.

From the CDN customers. They'll be annoyed if they find out the service they paid money for isn't doing what it's supposed to do.

Since they've paid the CDN, they don't care what Comcast has done or is doing - they paid the CDN, it's the problem of CDN.

Those customers aren't getting depeered, only Comcast.

I'm not sure of a more eloquent way to say this. Comcast's customers are the CDN's customer's customers.

To play devil's advocate, those CDN customers would also be unable to access content if their power went out. But nobody would think to say the CDN isn't doing their job if Texas had a blackout, because "I'm paying you to deliver my content to Texas, dammit!"

It's a bit of a stretch, but I think that's the analogy they're going for.

Right, but that relationship, especially as applies to support and subscription, is not transitive.

How do you depeer my customers' provider without depeering my customers? How do you cut off a router's network access without cutting off access to the networks behind it? How do you blacklist a /8 but not one of its /24s without an exemption list? How do I prevent Bob from forking my code, but allow people who fork from Bob to fork the modifications he would do to my code? How do you join tables on 2 databases when you can't authenticate to the first?

I'd be FURIOUS if my CDN cut off service to part of my customer base, so they could attack one of my customers' mutual other vendors. And you better believe our ticket system would overload with angry tickets about how our web platform is broken again.

Not nearly as much as Comcast though. If I have my home internet with Comcast and I suddenly can't access Netflix while my friends on other ISPs can access it just fine, then of course I'm going to call Comcast.