1) Residential broadband networks were never engineered as video delivery systems. The advent of mainstream streaming video completely changed the engineering calculus for last mile networks. Over subscription ratios need to change to accommodate the higher peak hour bitrates; this takes time and costs money. Where should this money come from? Why should I pay the same for my connection as the household that's running three or four simultaneous HD streams during peak hours? My 95th percentile is less than 0.5mbit/s, yet I pay the same as my neighbor who regularly runs three HD streams at the same time. Hardly seems fair, does it?
This is why you should offer cheap broadband plans to the tiny percentage of people who are willing to put up with slow service.
The reason that cable companies shouldn't try to find ways to stick it to the top 5% is that those early adopters are the ones who make new, cool technology financially feasible. They drive the Internet forward, allowing interesting services to come into existence. Eventually, the use of those services filters down to more and more customers. If you penalize the folks whose bandwidth usage falls within the top 5%, the Internet as a whole will inevitably stagnate. More importantly, there will always be a top 5% to penalize, so even if those folks stop doing what they are doing, the cable companies will then penalize a different group of people, leading to progressively declining quality of service.
3) IPTV is inherently inefficient vis-a-vis point-to-multipoint delivery systems (i.e., cable, OTA, satellite)
And yet the VoD services from your cable company work the same way. The difference is that their service is not throttled, because it travels only between the cable company offices and your home, without traversing any of the saturated external links. And that is what Netflix has to compete with.
5) Netflix has a history of trying to offload their costs onto third parties, be they ISPs, Tier 1 networks, CDNs, etc.
They pay CDNs to make content available closer to their customers. That's not offloading costs; it is distributing the load to reduce the impact on the Tier 1 networks. Besides, they are paying their bandwidth bill. They pay for access to the Internet, and their ISP pays their upstream, and so on, eventually resulting in the Tier 1 networks getting paid. The other side of the connection is the responsibility of the person on the other end, which means the individual residential customers, who pay for their own access to the internet, whose ISPs pay their ISPs, and so on, up to the Tier 1 backbone providers.
What the cable companies are trying to do is force one end of the connection to pay for the entire connection from one end to the other, which is pure bulls**t in any sane universe. That's just not the way the Internet works. The cable companies are the ones who are trying to offload what should legitimately be their costs onto a third party (Netflix), solely because that third party provides a service that is popular among their end user customers.
Sorry, but there's really no grey area here; Netflix is clearly on the right side of this, and the cable companies are clearly on the wrong side.