[hannasanarion]

"Last mile costs" are what consumers already pay for. The ISPs claim that netflix needs to pay extra or else they won't give their own customers the service that they have already paid for is extortion, plain and simple.

Netflix was already paying for an uplink connection of sufficient bandwidth. The customers were already paying for a downlink connection of sufficient bandwidth. The assertion that it's necessary to hold one party hostage in order to get more money from the other is absurd.

UPS doesn't demand that Amazon pay for its new trucks, and it certainly doesn't hold Amazon packages hostage until they do so. They're supposed to buy their infrastructure with the profit that they're already generating. And ISPs are seeing record profits right now.

[Junk_Collector]

Except, when Amazon generates a volume greater than UPS' capability to ship, UPS absolutely negotiates infrastructure and capital investments as part of their guaranteed service contract. If Amazon is unwilling to help them increase their capacity to ship, then they throttle the amount of packages that they will ship for Amazon so as not to shut out their other customers and damage their base. These are regular negotiations between large entities entering into partnerships.

What I am saying here is that your analogies are poor because you are uneducated about the topics you are analogizing from. Which sadly, has become a good analogy for the broader Net Neutrality debate.

You might also notice that I am not advocating for the ISPs in my last post. I feel that their demands on Netflix were excessive and unrealistic. That's why I described it as the ISPs trying to soak Netflix.