KillHour posted:

Are you an executive at Comcast or something? You're white-knighting a one hundred and fifty eight billion dollar company, and it's making everyone

Your assumptions on peering agreements are all kinds of hosed up. Maybe you should brush up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

By definition, peering cannot involve one side paying the other; that would be a transit agreement. The way things have always worked is that residential ISPs (such as Comcast) charge their customers primarily based on download. Commercial ISPs, on the other hand, typically charge primarily based on upload (since the vast majority of traffic flows from servers to clients, hence the names). A peering agreement in this case makes a ton of sense - the commercial ISP is saying to their customer "Hey, I'm going to charge you for the bandwidth you need to provide content, and I'm going to charge a large amount to do so (since fewer customers generate larger amounts of traffic)." The residential ISP is going to say to their customer "Hey, I'm going to charge you for the bandwidth you need to consume content, and I'm going to charge you relatively little for it, because I can oversubscribe my network to make up the difference (but I'm going to limit your upload, because that fucks with my ability to do that)." The ISPs don't charge each other, because they're already getting paid once for that traffic (by each of their customers).

Comcast is loving with this by saying "I should get paid by my both my customers AND your customers."

If you don't see how that's double dipping, I don't know what to tell you.