You might not like the logical conclusion: the ISPs charge people for what they actually use.
The cause of this dispute is that the ISPs each have a monopoly over access to a large distinct block of customers and want to leverage that into a tax on content distributors, creating an unlevel playing field in favor of the ISP's own over the top services in competition with services like Netflix.
What happened to all that "National Broadband Act" funding the Big5 ISP's got? What about annual infrastructure upgrades? These guys are not coping with the data-driven society the wold is now, and are trying to stretch their buck the furthest (I don't fault for that, it's business).
However, when they wrongly shift the blame to others, it really fires me up.
2) As trevelyan said, they operate around the world, and state that this situation, and mindset of last-mile carriers, is unique to the US.
3) One would think a backbone provider would share the same views as the last-mile carriers, since it would mean more money for them too. However, they state that big content providers such as Netflix are very much so not a problem, but instead it's the last-mile carrier's refusal to make necessary network infrastructure upgrades to augment capacity.
This information is available on their blog. This post in particular worth a read: http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/chicken-game-play...
It's always historically been the case that settlement free peering required balanced traffic ratios. The difference is L3 used to have far more consumer networks buying transit from them. Before, level3 was needed to connect a bunch of different regional ISPs together who each purchased IP transit. Now, every consumer ISP of any size can orderup a nationwide backbone network (from level3 ironically, yes despite being in a peering war for ip transit, comcast's nationwide fiber network is leased from level3.)
Many of the old Ma Bells that were broken up used to be clients of level3. Through the mergers, many of them now own Tier 1 backbone networks. Verizon, ATT, and CenturyLink all are now also competing backbone providers with Level3 as well as being consumer ISPs. This leaves Level3 in the position Cogent was in when L3 depeered them.
Level3 will now gladly split the costs for unbalanced traffic ratios now that it benefits them. 10 years ago they would have tried to extract transit/paid peering from the same situation from someone else.
Perhaps the whole balanced traffic ratios requirement doesn't work in a time when every consumer ISP has their own nationwide fiber network and many also own Tier 1 IP networks. Or perhaps expect Level3 to start looking to get bought/merge by Time Warner cable or Cox to even the playing field.