It's not just Netflix, it's also YouTube (http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/), and Level3 (http://blog.

It's not just Netflix, it's also YouTube (http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ http://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/), and Level3 (http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-internet-middleman/ http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-inte...) and you can be sure those aren't the exception. Instead of fulfilling their obligations to provide advertised bandwidth to their paying customers (who only pay them in order to access the content provided by someone else), the last-mile providers are using their customers as hostages while they negotiate ransom from the content providers. While they also report record profits (sending their customer's payments back to stockholders instead of into the network), because the economics of their business are compelling on both the consumer side (low expectations, minimal support costs, essentially no competition) and on the technology side (network technologies increase capacity-per-$ as fast or faster than traffic grows). Oh, also, 99% of the last-mile providers operate a sanctioned monopoly that has let them build and grow their networks with essentially guaranteed income from rate-payers and essentially no competition. Hence adding Internet is relatively low-cost and highly-profitable, but apparently not profitable enough.