How about you fuck off?

Cool, they can just live with fewer Uber drivers.

I've always noticed that the same thing happens with necessities. People empty the shelves and resell them at a premium without any news stories about how greedy they are. Bottled water, fuel, canned goods, ice, etc. are all resold at a premium by those who go to the store first.

If a store could raise prices, or "gouge" as you call it, they could afford to pay drivers and shippers from farther away to do special shipments and ensure that the shelves stay stocked. I'd prefer this to facing empty shelves because I forgot to pick something up, or the effects of the disaster lasts longer than my supplies and I get to the store too late

This.

What about all of the customers not downloading that data, should they also pay for these upgrades?

If I were a network operator and traffic from one of my peers from one specific source was saturating my connection, I would deprioritize that traffic.

Were the peering points congested in both directions, or just ingress to Comcast's network?

I agree, the companies providing transit to Netflix and other streaming providers should pay for the bandwidth being used by their customers.

Actually Netflix benefits by passing the costs to ALL Comcast customers and not just the ones who use their service.

If I were TW, I'd refuse too. Why do I have to allocate space in my datacenters for free for someone who is not a customer of mine?

I'm assuming Netflix doesn't buy transit from TW based on this:
http://bgp.he.net/AS2906

Now that Level 3 owns TW, this might change.

No, it's called one side abusing it's peer link.

Perhaps they originate traffic for certain user agents or devices on different subnets that are associated with different peers.

Agreed, and that's the worst thing about this - that I have to side with Comcast and support their position.

If the traffic was heavily tilted from Cogent to Comcast, it's not Comcast's responsibility to upgrade without charging more. If they demand paid transit, people will still complain about toll roads and "paid priority" while Comcast has to babysit the two connections and deal with billing disputes based on what amounts to overflow charges.

Perhaps Netflix wore out their welcome and Comcast no longer wanted to give them special treatment or allow anything beyond paid transit or eating the bottlenecks.