[acetheface]

Its not like the traffic is coming from no where. The traffic is being requested by Comcast's customers. So yes, they should be able to support the traffic their customers are requesting. If its not legitimate traffic, feel free to drop the peer.

My arguement is that ISPs should deliver the product they sell to consumers. If the consumers demand for Netflix goes up, the ISP should adapt to ensure proper bandwidth at peak. The internet on the whole and interconnection between companies is hardly static. Its constantly growing bandwidth wise and its really very simple to increase bandwidth to other providers. Technically its fairly easy without all the legal bits that get added in to peering agreements.

[sseveran]

Comcast wasn't negotiating the Netflix, it was negotiating with Cogent for how much bandwidth Cogent wanted. Netflix just happens to be a large driver of Cogent's interconnect needs but not the only one. Looking from the other direction Netflix could have used additional transit providers but elected not to for whatever reasons. I would humbly suggest that very few people understand the complexity of the product that an ISP delivers.