[santosha]

Not entirely sure why this is such a big deal. Peering agreements happen all the time. Lots of large services peer directly with consumer ISPs because it's cheaper and more efficient than using intermediary transit.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Comcast is not throttling or discriminating traffic in any way (at least not publicly). This is a peering dispute settlement.

Does this affect competitors to Netflix? Depends on how much volume they have. If their volumes are low, they can still reliably use transit providers more economically. As their revenue increases, they'll need their own backbone network, but their ability to pay for it goes up too.

Is Comcast big, bad and evil? Probably. But not in this case. Comcast dealing directly with Netflix is good for both parties. They are entitled to charge Netflix to peer directly because most traffic is going to flow into Comcast's network from Netflix. They also probably had a case negotiating away from settlement-free agreements with Cogent for the same reason. Again, none of this is out of the ordinary, ASes negotiate peering deals with each other all the time based on the volume and direction of the traffic they exchange with each other, and this is all fairly unregulated.

Net neutrality is irrelevant in all of this, it only matters if Comcast actively discriminates between traffic at their end. This deal is not connected to the ruling.

[gergles]

Comcast is a residential ISP. What possible traffic could there be to flow out of their network, other than requests for other data? By that logic, everyone has to pay to peer with Comcast because "Ha ha, we have all the customers. Darn, it sure is a shame that our customers don't have any data to send to you. Darn it, we really wish we could do free peering, but we just can't, aw, darn it. [cue South Park cable company responses]"

No, what happened was Comcast discovered another place they could fuck over the customer - by charging for peering even though it benefits their customers to not do so, and decided to spin it into some way that makes people feel like Comcast was somehow being injured by Netflix under the old settlement-free peering model.

[jauer]

While Comcast is primarily a residential ISP they do have a non-inconsequential number of transit & business customers that have more balanced or outbound heavy traffic flows. It most certainly isn't enough to balance out the residential traffic but they are trying to grow that end of the business.

[santosha]

Neither Comcast nor Netflix are trying to operate a non-profit, it's a payment dispute between two large companies who disagree over who should pay. You could just as well argue that Netflix was letting Cogent / Comcast fight it out instead of directly peering with ISPs which benefits customers.

[the_ancient]

The Biggest problem here is, I as a Comcast customer have already paid Comcast to bring me the packets from Netflix... That is what my outrageous bill every month is for..

They will now be DOUBLE BILLING for the same packet, a cost that WILL BE passed along to the netflix customer.

[_delirium]

But what about the Comcast customers who don't use Netflix? They win from this deal! At least, if you make the assumption that costs are passed on to the consumer, as you seem to be making.

[the_ancient]

Costs will be passed along on the netflix side

Savings(if any) will not be passed along on the comcast side

Personally I do not believe there will be any real saving for comcast in the first place, so there is nothing to pass along, it is 100% profit for them

[RKearney]

Previously Comcast argued that, I believe it was Level 3, was "pushing 5 times more data onto their network than Comcast was pushing onto theirs"

This made me laugh seeing as every one of Comcast's customer ISP packages have 5 times higher download speeds than upload speeds.

It's almost as if Comcast is forcibly causing an imbalance of traffic so they can extort more money out of Tier 1 providers.