So no business should ever have to pay for bandwidth because customers of said business are already paying? Or should I get free internet because businesses are already paying ISPs for their network access?
That sounds reasonable? If I'm an end-user, what I'm paying my ISP for is to get me data from Netflix (or youtube or wikipedia or ...); that is the whole point of having an ISP. If that means they need to run extra links to Netflix, then tough; that's what I'm paying them for.
You're paying them for access to the ISPs network. For an internet connection, this also comes with access to other networks through your ISPs peering and transit connections.
If you know of any ISP that would give me 100+ Gbps connectivity for my business, please let me know as I'd love to eliminate my bandwidth costs.
Businesses have to pay for bandwidth to get data to the customer's ISP, but they generally don't pay the customer's ISP for the same bandwidth the customer has already paid for.
Netflix did not have to pay Comcast either. One of their ISPs Level 3 already had peering arrangements with Comcast to deliver the content. Instead of paying their own ISP, Netflix wanted to get free bandwidth from Comcast. There's a difference.
Comcast threatened to throttle customers' bandwidth, refusing to deliver the speeds they had promised. The data was available to Comcast, customers had paid for the service of delivering that data, but Comcast wouldn't provide the full service they had sold unless Netflix paid them more.
The deeper issue is that Comcast is lying to their customers, promising them more bandwidth than they are able to deliver, so when Comcast's customers wanted to use all the bandwidth they bought to watch Netflix, Comcast couldn't afford to honor their promises.
But Comcast has a monopoly in the markets they serve, while Netflix exists in a competitive market, so Comcast got away with it.
No ISP can guarantee speeds outside of their network. Once it leaves their network it's considered best effort. Comcast has about 30 million subscribers. If they were to guarantee bandwidth out of their network, and if every subscriber had a laughably slow 10Mbps connection, Comcast would need 300Tbps of connectivity to every single company and network. For this reason, every ISP in the world "throttles" in one way or another.
They don't, and I never suggested they did. Netflix had their own ISPs. Netflix wanted the Customer's ISP to give them free bandwidth so they could offload the traffic from their other ISPs.
