"But when we ask [ISPs] if we too would qualify for no-fee interconnect if we changed our service to upload as much data as we download there is an uncomfortable silence."
That was a really weak part of the post. Settlement-free peering is when I route your traffic and you route my traffic and they're about even so there's not really anything to be gained by you paying me $1000 this month and me paying you $1000 next month. If Netflix were to start routing Comcast traffic to the general internet at the same rate that they route traffic from their data centers to Comcast, that would be a rather different story.
Offering to just accept and blackhole traffic is silly, and everyone involved knows it. I'm really disappointed that Netflix chose to present that argument in their post, because it's deliberately misleading about the nature of settlement-free peering.
Netflix originates a lot of traffic, but it doesn't accept non-Netflix traffic for routing. That is, I can't send a request for gmail.com to my ISP, who then sends it to Netflix, who then sends it to Google. Netflix does not have a neutral network which routes traffic regardless of origin or destination - they just accept requests for Netflix and serve responses from Netflix.
I mean, literally, that Netflix traffic is valuable to Comcast's customers (it's their movies) and not valuable to Comcast (it competes with their other offerings).
Isn't it valuable to Comcast as well in the long run? I know several people who have updated their internet packages to ensure high quality Netflix streaming. I have to imagine Comcast's profits on that upgrade far exceed the delivery costs.
I was puzzled by that argument as well. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Netflix is not a network provider. They do not route traffic. They are not a "peer". What traffic from Comcast are they going to offload, and to where?
The one thing which bothers me about the current ISPs is how their networks are designed for downloads. All cable, ADSL, and even some fibre connections all have greater download compared to upload.
How is any company which deals with a residential ISP expected to be a peer?
I wondered if this was an implicit threat to explore bittorrent like protocols for Netflix clients. In general, client to client sends between residential customers would make it more difficult for ISPs to block. In addition, at Netflix's scale, it would likely cause the balance of upload/download from residential clients to shift dramatically. ISPs would have to route a lot more uplink traffic which they generally avoid.
