Comment The economics are kind of weird on this (Score 1) 131
The majority of Netflix deployments are in ISP networks. ISPs love this because one of their biggest costs is building and paying for transit interconnect to the rest of the Internet. Most big bandwidth pushers either have their own in-ISP deployments or use CDNs like Akamai and Fastly that have in-network deployments. Netflix servers have lots of disk to store the bulk of their library, the only go upstream for the very long tail. This works for everyone. Forcing in-network traffic to be taxed will cause some real changes in the economics of hosting.
The basic economics are that ISPs get money from subscribers and to some extent from hosting, and pay for infrastructure and transit.
I wonder how this will affect CDNs. They deliver huge volumes in provider networks. Will their upstream fetches to cache hierarchies or customer origins be billed as traffic?
This whole things sounds like a bad idea - hard to implement and account. And what about the tens of thousands of smaller sites? Or VPN traffic, which deliberately disguises endpoints and hides all of the streams. Will VPN services pay for delivery in France?