>Most companies are already paying a premium to get content directly to users by way of CDNs. This already happens, has happened for years, and will continue to happen.

I don't recall objecting to that. If ISPs want to run a telco hotel at their central office and rent space for people to run a CDN, that's not a problem.

The problem comes when they subsequently leverage their monopoly over access to their own ISP customers to try to force content distributors to pay them for rack space, by refusing to accept free peering. If you don't actually need a presence at every ISP, the ISP shouldn't be able to force you to buy it from them just because they have a monopoly on those customers and can raise the price of peering so high that paying them for rack space becomes cheaper than buying it from anyone else.

If you're a network provider and you pay to bring your fiber to the demarc at another ISP's facility, that ISP should be required to accept the traffic. Because the alternative is blatant monopoly abuse.

>In the case of Youtube, this is a totally different issue, IMHO, because it's not really about content producers. It's about a shitload of bandwidth that an ISP has to build their network to handle.

How is that not about content producers? Content producers post content on YouTube. It has to get where it's going at a price that makes operating YouTube viable (and operating its smaller competitors viable, lest YouTube become an abusive monopoly too) or they won't be able to do that anymore. And the ISPs have big, bad reasons to try to make YouTube-like services unviable: It requires a lot of bandwidth and it competes for viewer attention with their own TV offerings.

>The ISP is just a "dumb pipe" to you and me, but they have serious outlay to provide a lag-free Youtube experience to their customers for which they get nothing back.

Where does "they get nothing back" come from? They get back the very substantial monthly fees that all of their end customers pay to have access to YouTube. That is what that money is for -- to bring packets from YouTube and all rest of the internet to and from those customers. And every video YouTube serves has been requested by one of those paying customers.

ISPs who expect customers to do nothing more than check their email are quite capable of offering a barebones plan that allows no more than 128kbps sustained download speeds and is incapable of streaming video. But they shouldn't be allowed to charge $60 and $100 a month for multi-megabit residential connections and then be heard to complain about it when the service they advertised is the one their customers want to use.

I should point out that these ISPs are a) massively profitable and b) have been dragging their feet over network upgrades for about as long as they've existed. I have little sympathy for complaints about network upgrades when I go outside and see the same piece of copper coming into my house that has been there for half a century instead of the shiny fiber they've been promising for what seems like decades.

>IMHO there's not enough information in the article to blame either party one way or the other, but I think that most people on HN are treating this more as a net neutrality thing and not as a contract dispute.

I think the mistake you're making is in assuming that those are two different things. What do you think network neutrality is about other than preventing ISPs from leveraging their monopolies into abusive contracts with other parties? Can you see how raising the price of reaching an ISP's customers for all of the entities that compete with the ISP's pay TV content, but not raising the price for the ISP's own content, is bad for everyone including the ISP's customers?