@PSX_Defector said:
Which a lot of the Netflix hubbub was not actually about. Comcast actually was putting traffic shaping into their pipes. Like 15 years ago. But people have rioted and screamed about that for years. Deep packet inspection is a pipe dream at the moment for ISPs bigger than your typical rural WISP. The amount of hardware and software required for it would be immense. And just doing per route shenanigans doesn't help when you have a CDN that can change the destinations on a whim.
It's a super complicated issue.
So what was the hubbub about then? I understand the peering point discussion and agree that (CDNs not withstanding) that who ever Netflix's original ISP was, that provider was probably violating their peering agreement with the rest. But that isn't Netflix's problem, that's their ISP's problem. If the ISP now needs to pay off all of it's peers because its peering usage was unfair, fine.. if they needed to pass that fee along to Netflix, again probably fine.
I'm sure I'm overly simplifying it and would love to know more about it.