Oh no, I fully believe Netfix / Youtube / Anyone else should be paying any ISP to interconnect with them if said content companies wants to use an ISP as a peer.
The absolute is content companies have to pay for their transit, as they have nothing to "give" to balance out into a peering agreement. Any ISP could care less unless their small fries if any content companies traffic makes it into their network. Assuming "better access to x content company's content" doesn't count as something to give, thats something to be expected if content companies want to stay in business.
The thing people of you fail to realize is agreements like this are in no way nor never can be classified as "a failure of net neutrality". Net Neutrality has squat to do with backbone transit. You can't keep looking at Netflix, Youtube, and the huge providers of content like you do DSLReports, or Reddit, or whatever small fries website in comparison to big content company's traffic.
As an example, Netflix puts outbound over 1,000,000 mbit/s of traffic (
Link to back that up). That is more than most Teir 2 transit companies touch bi-directionally per second to all of their customers combined. That is a single content company, creating more traffic than a company that provides backbone access for several thousand small companies. Or as another example, thats 10x more than the amount of traffic handled by popular Canadian ISP TekSavvy (
Link again)
Its easy for a content company this size to overwhelm a single peering point of any sized ISP. And with a content provider playing pick and choose instead of spreading load, all this traffic never sees half the other peer points of an ISP.
Should the ISP upgrade the peer? Hell no! They have tens of peering points in that location already that handle just fine aside from this one, hence why you see all these reports of
EVERY OTHER SERVICE BESIDES NETFLIX working fine simultaneously to Netflix bogging down.
If Netflix were to say "hey we need to diversify and spread all this traffic into several Teir1 peering points, with people such as Level3, Cogent, XO, Global Crossing, HE, etc" at their peering points, then you'd probably never see this happen with any ISP, at all. Netflix's traffic would travel over multiple peering points as it hit the internet, and would have several routes of priority into any ISP with their already established multiple links. That takes money though, and from the ISP's eyes they already have multiple peers to handle this for every other company not sending out traffic in the order of magnitude Netflix does.
You don't see this in smaller ISP's networks because they only have one or two peering points, or may not even be multi homed at all. When they saturate, they saturate for everything. This is why smaller ISPs that can actually attach to a Netflix POP tend to do this "open connect" agreement. They get to not have to upgrade their 1 or 2 backbone connections to the world if they can hook a large line for free into a Netflix POP. Generally this ends up not being free either, as the ISP has to build to a pop, or upgrade a backbone to a POP, but at least they don't have to pay for DIA on that part of the connection, as Netflix is giving ti away.
This Netflix fiasco of linking with providers directly is one of many ways Netflix, Youtube, or any other big player could fix this congestion. Netflix could have chosen to scale back their peering with who they use now, and instead open peer point with the 10's of other Teir1 providers they don't use at all their pop's, and this would fix for everyone. Instead the biggest of the ISP's with the largest of capacity problems to Netflix have chosen to go into agreement with each other. This sets a standard for every other provider that doesn't also peer to Verizon of Comcast to need to do the same to fix their issue with Netflix.
