Despite Netflix's attempt to glom on to the net neutrality movement, peering agreements are something entirely different and are not going away anytime soon.

The early Internet functioned on a gentleman's handshake - you send traffic onto my network, I send traffic onto your network, over time the balance will mostly net out. The system operated on the presumption that everyone's traffic increased more or less in parallel over time and so everybody's infrastructure would be upgraded in parallel.

The problem is that Netflix now makes up a 37% share of all internet traffic. The traditional way you do that is a CDN, and Netflix used to do that. But in 2012 Netflix decided to save money by shifting away from CDNs into their own datacenters and purchase up all the transit capacity they could. Basically, become their own ISP that took advantage of the gentleman's agreement (because nobody wants to send any significant volume of traffic to Netflix, they have almost no infrastructure costs of their own, so the inherent detente of traffic volume falls apart).

http://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-to...

The solution for Netflix was always clear, you either pay peering fees, you pay for a CDN who pays peering fees, or you pay to colocate servers with Comcast so there's no peering involved. The problem is that Netflix doesn't want to pay for their infrastructure. The rules on infrastructure costs for residential players are never, never the same as the rules for industrial users. The fact that you paid for a driveway doesn't mean that you will never have to pay a toll, and heavy users will actually have to pay to remediate the damage to local roads/etc caused by their heavy traffic (used in some states/localities where trucks carrying fracking fluid beat up the roads). Analogously - if you make up 1/3 of all internet traffic and are still growing rapidly, you are going to have to expect to pay for some extra infrastructure along the path your data take, even if it's technically outside the boundary of your datacenter.

An analogous real-world "gentleman's agreement" is the postal delivery system (actually it's formalized in the Universal Postal Union treaty). When you mail a package to Germany, the German post office gets paid almost nothing, they essentially deliver that package at a loss. And the same applies when a German mails a package to the US. The assumption is that this roughly nets out. Then you get someone like China who comes along and subsidizes postage as an easy way to boost exports and help their economy, and suddenly things no longer net out. The US government, as the "last mile" provider here, eventually had to file a WTO suit to get them to stop dumping.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-halts-export-subsidy-progr...

So no, nothing to see here, what Netflix is doing is not part of Net Neutrality, it's a cheap attempt to glom onto the movement to subsidize their infrastructure costs. The same predatory tactics are roundly rebuffed when they're done with other "neutral networks" like the post, and it's been rightly rebuffed with Netflix too. Comcast never shaped any traffic or refused to allow any customers access - they just didn't upgrade their infrastructure to the level Netflix wanted them to until Netflix paid for it, and those links were congested.

I hate having to defend Comcast because they are a shit company with shit customer service, but if you are dropping mass volumes of data onto the network to the extent that infrastructure upgrades are necessary (again: 37% of all internet traffic is Netflix) then yeah, you get to pay for them. Otherwise it's just pushing your Netflix bill onto my internet bill.