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On the other hand, if your entire business idea revolves around pumping several orders of magnitude more data than anyone else normally does, is it still reasonable to assume others will foot the bill building the infrastructure?

If someone told you in 2001 that they would start a service based on delivering millions of full HD video streams concurrently over the internet, would you be able to take them seriously?

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> On the other hand, if your entire business idea revolves around pumping several orders of magnitude more data than anyone else normally does, is it still reasonable to assume others will foot the bill building the infrastructure?

Except Netflix is not pumping data anywhere. This data has already been paid for and is being requested by Comcast's network. They also are not asking anyone to "foot the bill" - they've offered to pay for it entirely.

It's a reality that consumer internet is heavily oversubscribed, and sold with the assumption that the average load is much much lower than 100% per costumer. You can claim that the data is already paid for because you are paying for X mbps, but the real price for sustained X mbps 100% is much higher. The alternatives are charging a helluva lot more per customer to actually cover costs (business-level pricing) or a much much lower mbps limit.

shrug that's business. You pays your money and takes your chances. Comcast (et al) gambled on some level of oversubscription and that's not working for them in reality. It's hard to argue that Netflix is somehow at fault for any of this and it's only the monopoly power of the last-mile ISPs in the US that's making this even a consideration.

How many Verizon customers would I, as an ATT customer, have to call/text on a regular basis before you would find it reasonable for Verizon to start charging me?

Also, what was feasible in 2001 is a really poor indicator of what's a reasonable business model today.

What if instead of one service like Netflix, we had a hundred little ones that served the same total number of customers?

The problem isn't Netflix. The problem is that a ton of customers are paying Comcast for 250 GB per month at 50 Mbps, which their infrastructure is incapable of actually providing.

Comcast should absolutely foot the bill. They are the ones unable to fulfill their end of the contract.

Of course, if you start charging an American customer different monthly rates for different levels of utilisation (i.e.: quota or average percentage utilisation), they'll protest about having some imaginary rights taken away from them.

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