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I could agree with that, but later they say that it's not fair that Comcast customers without Netflix pay for the bandwidth of Netflix users. I understand that

I could agree with that, but later they say that it's not fair that Comcast customers without Netflix pay for the bandwidth of Netflix users. I understand that Netflix uses a lot of bandwidth, but what about heavy P2P users that have their traffic subsidized by other customers -- or any other site that is not used by all customers. That's how it works. Everyone pays for access for everyone (except there is tiered access so you are explicitly paying more if you are a heavy user), it's the same way health care works in Canada for the most part.

rtpg 12y ago
The problem (on both sides of the argument) is that there's conflation of the website-ISP relationship (i.e. should Comcast be allowed to throttle services/make "fast lanes" for certain services) and the provider-provider relationship (i.e. should Comcast allow other providers to get direct connection into their backbone?) The agreements between Comcast and Netflix fall into the latter, but because people only think of Netflix as 'a bunch of servers connected to the internet', many don't realize that Netflix/Cogent has stuff inside the backbone, which is a different discussion. A (shitty) analogy would be the difference between the post office charging me more in stamps depending on who I was when I want to send a letter (net neutrality), and the USPS charging me for the right to be able to have my own stuff inside the post-offices themselves and dropping stuff directly into the trucks.