Yeah, but here's the thing - if there's a connection point between cogent and comcast that is saturated, and it's degrading the netflix experience for comcast users, then netflix has incentive to pay for the upgrades (as if they can no longer provide adequate service to comcast, they'll lose customers), netflix's CDN providers have incentive (because otherwise they may lose netflix's business), and netflix's users have incentive. Maybe comcast would have more incentive if they had more competition, but they do not, but I think that issue is largely orthogonal.
There's no clear answer because there's a lot of competing and overlapping incentives here. But at the end of the day, if comcast has to foot the bill to improve quality for netflix customers, how is that fair to comcast customers that aren't using netflix? It is pretty sensible to think that Netflix users should be paying for Netflix service. If Netflix is selling me streaming video without also having a suitable CDN to get me that video, I suggest to you that they've sold me something they can't deliver on. If nobody can build that CDN because my ISP sucks and makes unreasonable terms, netflix should probably stop selling to users of my ISP.
This really reminds me of everyone who was complaining about UPS around the holidays for not delivering their amazon packages in time, even though UPS wasn't giving any shipping guarantees due to the peak demand. Amazon was still providing estimated arrival dates, however, but it turns out those weren't based on much (or at least, enough).
There's no clear answer because there's a lot of competing and overlapping incentives here. But at the end of the day, if comcast has to foot the bill to improve quality for netflix customers, how is that fair to comcast customers that aren't using netflix? It is pretty sensible to think that Netflix users should be paying for Netflix service. If Netflix is selling me streaming video without also having a suitable CDN to get me that video, I suggest to you that they've sold me something they can't deliver on. If nobody can build that CDN because my ISP sucks and makes unreasonable terms, netflix should probably stop selling to users of my ISP.
This really reminds me of everyone who was complaining about UPS around the holidays for not delivering their amazon packages in time, even though UPS wasn't giving any shipping guarantees due to the peak demand. Amazon was still providing estimated arrival dates, however, but it turns out those weren't based on much (or at least, enough).