> It's really cheap to get $500 million dollars out of Netflix to pay for your line upgrades. And for the next 4 years, they have a blank check to shake down co

> It's really cheap to get $500 million dollars out of Netflix to pay for your line upgrades. And for the next 4 years, they have a blank check to shake down companies in the background. This. The consumers aren't the direct targets here, at least not for wired networks. The first targets would be the content providers. You want to push content to the millions of Comcast subscribers? Pay up. Naturally, the content providers won't get stuck with the bill and eventually roll it over to the customers. But that would be them billing you more, not the ISPs directly, which is easier for them. There are known examples of this behavior -https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140718/06533327927/level3-proves-that-verizon-is-absolutely-to-blame-netflix-congestion-using-verizons-own-data.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140718/06533327927/level.... In today's networks, a LOT of the traffic is streaming video, especially from YouTube and Netflix. Ten years ago it was BitTorrent, and back then "Fast Lanes" meant "Slow lanes for BitTorrent because it's congesting our network". The story here is that as the Internet matured and connectivity became a ubiquitous, off-the-shelf product, the money went into content. So content producers are fairy profitable, but the network operators feel like they've been left out - they're the ones carrying all of this expensive content, but they don't get a slice of the money. That's not to say that companies like Comcast won't try to get more money out of consumers too, but that's trickier since the customers are used to a certain type of service and getting them to pay more for more of the same would be an uphill battle.