All internet services pay for their bandwidth, they don't get paid to be online. Usually that means paying a hosting company, which pays a data center, which pa

All internet services pay for their bandwidth, they don't get paid to be online. Usually that means paying a hosting company, which pays a data center, which pays some transit provider like Cogent or Level 3 to get onto the internet. Netflix was paying Cogent to link it to the internet. Now Netflix's servers are directly linked to Comcast, so Comcast is connecting it to the internet [ed: to Comcast's customers], and that's who they're paying instead. Why would they want to pay Comcast instead of Cogent? Because Comcast's fight with Cogent was resulting in poor performance for Netflix customers. They had the option of waiting for it to get bad enough that one side or the other gave in on the negotiations and increased capacity, meanwhile losing customers frustrated with buffering at peak hours, or choosing an alternate route to get their bits to those customers. It also nicely sets up barriers for entry to new video streaming services, which is something maturing companies tend to do. Netflix has grown big enough to buy transit directly from ISPs instead of through middle-men like Cogent, while startups don't have the capital for that.