I pay USPS; if some of what I pay USPS is passed off, by them, to China Post, that is inconsequential to me. Paying extra for special delivery options is an interesting point I hadn't thought of previously; that being said, there is no analogy for that here, as there is no means by which to pay a provider extra to make them maky your ISP deliver the packets faster; you pay your ISP extra for that. As for COD/Postage Due, that's a specific shipping option that some carriers make available to the sender, which, again, has no analogue here. If I'm missing something, please correct me, but I won't hold my breath.

Indeed. Are you trying to educate me, or the other readers here? I ask because it sure seems like you're trying to tell me something I've already more or less stated.

But you have to know *WHAT* to cache. Will I watch Family Guy tonight? Or will I watch American Dad? Or maybe something else entirely? Hell, I might watch anything from the Netflix catalog, so I guess I need to cache all of it. You're totally missing the boat when Netflix is willing and able to colocate their hardware in ISP datacenters and, even in some cases, willing to pay to be allowed to do so; and we're talking about hardware that caches 100% of their catalog. You also fail to address streaming devices which have no local storage (and, therefore, no means by which to cache anything). You're also glossing over the fact that, with an end-user-side cache, each video being cached (whether it's ever watched or not) is yet more data being pushed through external links, which cost both Netflix and the ISP more money, while a colo solution means pushing each piece of content through those links exactly once, after which it's in the ISP-local cache and only has to traverse the ISP's "only as congested as we allow it to be" network.

Seriously, give this a bit of thought before you start mashing keys.

And how, exactly, would implementing an end-user-side cache make things any better? All of that data would have to traverse the ISP network still; in fact, in order to address the issues caused by congestion (e.g. frequent pauses and breaks in the video stream), *more* data would have to traverse the ISP network, in order fo that data to already be in the user's cache before they requested it; since we can't know what the user is going to request before they do so, we have to send a little bit of everything. Were you planning on increasing the system requirements for using Netflix to gigabytes or terrabytes of disk space? And what about streaming devices that don't have local storage at all?

Methinks your solution wasn't very well thought out, my friend.

I think your ISP dropped the packet between "can" and "even".

It's not even a matter of Comcast not investing in their infrastructure; they actively degraded their links to L3 when Netflix was refusing to pony up the dough. I'm pretty sure they had to pay people to do that, so it's more like they actively invested in degrading their network.

Agreed. Between two intermediary providers I could see this, but when it is your end user directly requesting the traffic, there is nothing but upside in allowing them to do so, and as quickly as you possibly can. Happy customers stick around through bigger rate hikes, after all.

There's nothing wrong with Netflix, Hulu, Google, or anyone else for that matter, going directly to an ISP and saying "Here's some equipment; if you install it, your users will be able to get our content, which is a big reason they pay you, faster." There is, likewise, nothing wrong with the ISP saying "Sure, let's get that equipment installed. It's gonna cost you $10,000.00/mo to use our facilities and backbone." And, there's nothing wrong with the two parties agreeing to, and implementing that. What's wrong is the ISP moving the intermediary providers (e.g. the backbones) between them and the provider wishing to install their equipment onto slower links until the provider agrees to pay the fee (at which point, the intermediary becomes irrelevant and probably remains on the degraded link), thereby degrading service for everybody. Especially when there is a peering agreement between the ISP and the intermediary provider and/or the intermediary is willing (and even asking or begging) to pay for the link they were on before.

And if you think that's not exactly what happened, please, explain this.

I made it work, actually...

Actually, it's more like a food counter with different chefs paying rent for their kitchen space (more rent = more space), customers paying at the counter (which then takes a cut) when they order, and some chefs also paying rent at the counter to be allowed to serve their food faster. Except that the counter and the kitchen are owned by two separate companies, which already have an agreement to allow the food traffic to flow freely.

The first thing wrong, here, is your understanding of the issue. Netflix pays their provider already, and they push their data through their provider; that provider, then, pushes the data through the next provider, and so on, and so forth, until it reaches the intended user. In essence, it is not Netflix pushing the data through each provider, but rather each consecutive provider pushing the data to the next, and they all have peering agreements which should cover situations where there is an imbalance in traffic. None of this is, nor should be, of any concern to Netflix or the end user, so long as they are both paying their respective providers.

Post a package from the US to China. Do it. Pick a random address in China, put a random item in a box, drive to the post office, and send the box to that address. How many providers carry that box? At least 2. How many do you pay? One. We're talking about the same concept, here.

Thanks for the backup; I've had a busy weekend and it's left me mentally incapable of forming a meaningful reply to the GP post.

Nothing apologist about it, just calling out racism where I see it. Statistically yes, at least in the US, it does appear that black males who offend tend to do so more violently and more frequently than other offenders, but let's tow the racism party line by insinuating that all black men are offenders. This is just a case of the few ruining it for the many.

Tribal leaders love the shiny.

In reality, it's only something like 1% of that 7% of the population, with something like another 5% of that population involved in violent crime or robbery and 10% involved in nonviolent crime (I'm excluding drug use here for a reason). The remaining 84% of that group, comprising 5.88% of the population are, at the least, well-meaning people, and many of them are even pleasant to be around.