I tend to side on L3's notion that upgrading the interconnects is something with such a large pay-off it's miserly to even consider worrying about it. My unders

I tend to side on L3's notion that upgrading the interconnects is something with such a large pay-off it's miserly to even consider worrying about it. My understanding of it is that as the pipes get larger demand follows to consume more, and with higher demand comes a greater market to serve. And you can bet many companies salivate at the chance to get a piece of the Netflix pie (including Verizon et al.)! It always struck me as duplicitous of the ISPs to talk about who holds the cost for the Netflix volume, since most are also attempting to sell in the same market as Netflix (namely streaming video and TV shows). It just smacks of conflict of interest. It's not like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner don't all stream _enormous_ amounts of video either, and it's not like I as a consumer care about all the technical nonsense. (I also was terribly underwhelmed by the switch to HD broadcast TV, and generally feel like the signal glitches are so grievously bad and corrupted that surely someone pulled a fast one there.) Really, I suspect this whole mess may merely be the result of the companies providing the pipes also competing on content, and their roles get muddied. We expect to be able to abstract away all that peering nonsense as a consumer, and since the Internet is so stupefyingly big, creating special cases seems like an unreasonable burden to push on the typical consumer who neither understands not cares how the magic info-pipe works (my personal stance). Of course the techie part of me has a load of popcorn to see how it turns out. As I noted elsewhere, it kinda doesn't matter who is technically right. My money is on the angry ignorant masses who just want some shows before sleep, and against whomever they blame. So far, my money's on Netflix, as cable companies are somewhat reviled by comparison.