because Verizon is being paid by their customers to access this data.
Why should verizon have any peering agreements with anyone?
Why not just operate their own network that doesn't peer out to the internet as a whole?
As a customer of an ISP, I'm not paying for the ISP to deliver me to their own internal network. I'm paying them to deliver my data to the peered connections. ALWAYS.
If my ISP has one peered connection that's beyond capacity, I expect them to upgrade it, as it's the cost of doing business.
And especially when it's cheap. This is chump change to them, and Level3 even offered to pay for it..... why is verizon saying no?