[takeda]

LOL Level 3 is not the problem here. In fact they are on the side of Netflix.

The regional ISPs are making big fuss, because until now they were sending about the same amount of traffic to Level3 as they were receiving, which allowed them to not charge each other for the traffic. As now there's more traffic coming from Level3 than goes the other way. As per their agreements would make them pay to Level 3 for the difference.

Because of that they prefer to simply throttle incoming traffic from L3, despite the fact that it is the traffic requested by their own users, they also refuse to peer directly with Netflix because Netflix also competes with their services as a cable companies.

[sriram_sun]

I realize that Level3 is on the same side as Netflix. The question was can Netflix play the same game the regional ISPs are playing. Let's assume Netflix acquires Level3. Since Level 3 is the backbone for a large portion of the traffic in this country, some Comcast data would have to go through Level3 to reach their customers right? So if Comcast throttles Netflix traffic, then Level3(now Netflix) just blocks Comcast traffic at the "backbone level". The question is theoretical. I know this is really bad for the end consumer.

[takeda]

You can't do that. If you are an internet middle man your job is to deliver traffic from one network to another. If you're failing at it then you're failing at your job and quickly someone else will take your place and you get out of business.

On top of that there are peering agreements which might also mention against that.

What's happening here is that ISPs such as Comcast already purposefully hurt their own consumers by providing sub-par service. No one else would normally care about it but to Netflix that's large number of their own customers and they're willing to bend backwards to be able to stream to them.

The problem is that there's really no competition so either we should remove laws and allow once again for competition, provide competition for example by letting cities provide Internet as well or heavy regulation (starting with title 2/common carrier) of existing monopolies, similarly how we do this to other utilities such as electricity/water/gas etc.