Verizon sells their service to their customers under the terms of providing a "best effort" to reach the advertised speeds. Fulfilling a promise of "best effort" does not require attaining the advertised speeds to every endpoint, but it does require some effort. Given that Level 3 has offered to pay all of the equipment and labor costs of upgrading the peering connection, and Verizon has stated that their network is not congested internally, what Verizon is refusing to do is literally the smallest possible non-zero effort that they could make towards alleviating the congestion.
Nobody is calling for anything that would fail to be "respecting property rights". Verizon is not fulfilling their obligations to their own customers; that needs to be corrected. Changing the regulatory landscape to remove the perverse incentives that have led to Verizon's misbehavior is a bigger and separate project.
Nobody is calling for anything that would fail to be "respecting property rights". Verizon is not fulfilling their obligations to their own customers; that needs to be corrected. Changing the regulatory landscape to remove the perverse incentives that have led to Verizon's misbehavior is a bigger and separate project.