[msandford]

Netflix is only sending the data at the request of Comcast's customers. Comcast is the company which created an asymmetric network such that their customers can request far, far more data than they are able to send. They are reaping the rewards of that decision. It hardly seems reasonable to expect that all the companies that Comcast peers with to have data flowing in equal amounts both ways since the design of Comcast's network explicitly prohibits this.

Trying to boil this down to "Netflix is sending a lot more than it's receiving" is to completely ignore WHY this is happening and really makes the debate useless. Symmetric (or nearly symmetric) peering agreements made sense when everyone had symmetric connections like modems, ISDN, T1, T3, etc.

When the majority of connections are not symmetric, it makes no sense at all.

Again, remember that Netflix isn't DOSing Comcast. Any packets that Netflix sends to Comcast's network was at the request of one of Comcast's (and Netflix's!) customers.

[ikeboy]

Why aren't the customers that send less data than they receive balanced out by those that send more than they receive? For every byte being sent, there's someone on both sides, so an ISP serving a large enough area should balance out. Except with huge outliers like Netflix.

[tzs]

Netflix is not an outlier when it comes to asymmetrical traffic. The typical Comcast customer receives from Google far more data than they send to Google. They receive far more data from Amazon than they send to Amazon. Same for their interaction with Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, the bank, their email provider, their gaming guild forum, and so on. About the only time they might be sending as much as they receive is when they are using the internet for a voice or video chat.

[ikeboy]

But some of those sites are going to be Comcast customers, who serve customers from other places.

I'm not saying that an average consumer is sending as much as they receive, but Comcast doesn't only have consumers, they also serve websites. That should balance out for small websites in and out of their network.