I am not sure I completely 'get' your argument here on the Comcast piece.
Traditionally Comcast would get paid by end users for access, and Comcast would buy service from a Tier-1 ISP. Netflix would get paid by end users for their content and they would also buy service from a Tier-1 ISP. Netflix could also distribute their service by pushing their content to a CDN who also paid for their access to either Comcast, TWC, Verizon, etc (you don't think Akamai and Limelight get their access for free do you)
Old Model:
User >>>$$>>> Comcast >>>$$>>> T1 ISP >>$$>>> Content
Distributed Old Model
User >>>$$>>> Comcast >>$$>>> Content
Direct Peering Model
User >>>$$>>> Comcast >>$$>>> Content
I fail to see why you are so upset that Comcast and Netflix have eliminated the middle-man here. Netflix drove enough bandwidth to find CDNs very expensive and to find that the performance through their T1 ISPs was not only cost prohibitive but also had challenges with service quality. Comcast had enough users and a large enough backhaul network on their own to be able to offer a direct peering model into local markets for less than Netflix was paying their CDN provider + T1 ISP before as a percentage of number of users served via Comcast. Comcast won't need anywhere near as much connectivity from their CDN customers that supported Netflix (and were paid by Netflix) so that revenue stream actually goes away. (why is no one upset about poor CDN players in this!)
On the flip side to the first point made by NoKaOi above Cisco has always been a strong advocate against Net Neutrality - primarily because it drives requirements for more intelligent devices in the network that can do exactly what you are saying - prioritize certain traffic types ahead of others. Whether that is the hypothetical and altruistic sounding examples Cisco used or the more pragmatic 'Bob pays more than Bill, give Bob better service' (which does sort of seem to be the way the world works in most other areas - I know if I buy the 55Mb burst service I sure would like to get a better service level than the guy down the street not buying it...) or the more nefarious examples that everyone likes to also throw out: Our cable company owns a media company that produces TV programming - so we are going to de-prioritize competing programs so that their service level makes them darn near unusable versus keeping our own TV programming at such a high bit rate that its service level is great and it becomes the preferred show you watch - not because the content is better but because the performance/viewing experience is.
From everything I have read here this last one is the one that has everyone worried and 'up in arms' about Net Neutrality. Its also, as a fairly experienced network engineer, very very very difficult, borderline impossible, to accomplish. If you've ever looked at the configurations on those big, fast, routers in the core of networks like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc, or the PE boxes at the edge of the carrier networks you will find that no device can and no network engineer wants to administer or ever implement and a policy that tries to identify a specific piece of content and de-prioritizes it. Simply put the TCAM based forwarding architectures in the large routers do not have the depth of inspection in them to identify a specific piece of streaming content and increase its priority over another.
Compounding the absolute impracticality of the argument is that most content shops use CDNs. So if I was a cable MSO I would probably have a nice tertiary income stream by selling some of my network resources to a CDN provider: this gets me a little bit of $, and means I don't have to go through a cost center Tier-1 ISP link to get those, usually rather large data streams, to my customers so everyone kinda wins. But if I then wanted to identify specific media traffic or a specific program coming from a competing site - lets say as a Cable MSO I found that 'Hannity and Colmes' was a show that we hated, was getting watched too much in our market, and we wanted people to watch our version of right-leaning news - I would have to do the following:
1) Identify the streaming media traffic sourced from Fox that was the specific 'Hannity and Colmes' show being streamed
This is harder than it sounds: Many streaming media systems use a well known tCP port for the session control but then use a relatively random UDP port for the live streaming or a separate TCP session for the actual content delivery in an on-demand model. Also no-where in the packet headers is the actual program identified unless its in the URL of the initial request which is not in subsequent packets and may also only be in the control channel.
2) Parse all the traffic going to and from my CDN partner to try an dal so identify 'Hannity and Colmes' - since they use redirected HTTP requests, customer coded URLs, and custom coded DNS - this is about impossible.
3) Now if I wanted I suppose I could put a customer 'gateway' in front of every customer or group of them that terminated their SSL packets, somehow spoofing the end site and tracking every URL in a full proxy mode and then running a deep packet inspection engine to look for all URL combinations that look lie they could be 'Hannity and Colmes' while also employing a team of people to monitor Fox's site for any URL or name changes and then keep this policy updated at every CO/Headend on every gateway.
While #3 is probably the most realistic way to actually solve this you also have to accept that a device that does this level of inspection, de-cryption/re-encryption, and has the traffic management capabilities costs well over $100k for a 10Gb performance. It also violates about every principle and tenet of cryptography and would be flagged by your browser in about 1/10th of a second as a man-in-the-middle since it wouldn't have the key for fox.com. But even assuming in fantasy-land where that didn't matter and was possible you are not looking at an aggregate costs of millions of dollars of CAPEX, a team of network engineers, and a team of content monitoring folks simply to make a show 'Hannity and Colmes' suck more than it already does... let's be frank... it doesn't need a Cable MSO's help to suck any more - its doing fine on its own! (it also happens to be economically unfeasible)
dg
