Dr. Frank's What's-it

The cable company monopoly on content delivery is doomed. A smart cable company would be looking to take market share from other cable providers, implementing a la carte pricing and provide customers with other perks and conveniences that would make switching to IPTV a less clear-cut decision. If Netflix were a cable company, that's what they would be doing.

You would think that by now, companies would be able to see the road to ruin that awaits anyone who spends their time and energy trying to defend market dominance that's based on old, obsolete technology (major record labels, Blockbuster, etc.), but I guess the natural human desire to desperately cling to what we already have tends to take precedence...

Comcast wasn't going to (and can't) "block Netflix", no matter what the more hyperbolic NetNeutrality pushers (and Level3, at least momentarily for PR reasons) wanted us to believe.

They were going to charge Level3 extra for lopsided peering, just like Level3 did when Cogent was in the same situation with them.

(And indeed, just as everyone in the industry does when that ends up happening, regardless of the content responsible for the lopsided peering arrangement.)

Given that Netflix has other peering providers than Level3, and that Comcast was never going to "block" Level3 itself (bad for Comcast customers!), there's no "there" there.

Makes sense, Sigi, but I still see the makings of a fine marketing campaign in there somewhere.

The peering argument doesn't hold water because it's Comcast's own customers who are initiating these streams. If it was Level 3 passing their traffic through Comcast to someone other than Comcast's own customers, then absolutely they would need to abide by existing peering arrangements.

It may seem like much ado about nothing right now, but this issue is only going to get more and more prominent as cable companies search for ways to prop up their flagging business model without substantially changing it.