"Now it makes perfect sense how Level 3 managed to outbid Akamai since no CDN provider operating legally could outbid hot goods." I think he means contractuall

"Now it makes perfect sense how Level 3 managed to outbid Akamai since no CDN provider operating legally could outbid hot goods." I think he means contractually rather than legally, very big difference and suggests that this story is a beat-up. There is no way in the world that Comcast (a dedicated end user provider) was almost equal with L3 (almost dedicated to providing first-tier backbone to private networks and colo) Peering is interesting in that you can get a lot of free hosting if you find a company that does a lot of inbound but no outbound. We hosted all of the OpenBSD, FreeBSD and 100+ other projects au mirrors for 10+ years for free hitting peaks of gbits+ because of the provider having to make up peering arrangements. I imagine Comcast would be the same (we did it with a similar company - home broadband provider) This is definitely a case of Comcast attempting to double-dip and feeding a story to a journalist to get their side of the argument out (the journalist even put a hit on one of his competing publications for 'getting it wrong')