Re: Pollyannas think carriers won't use their clout
"In fact, LR reported Comcast as saying, "Netflix receives no preferential network treatment under the multi-year agreement."
Come on, if that's so, what are they paying for? To NOT be slowed down? That sounds much like the baseball bat/china shop analogy.
As I have read it, Netflix previously peered with Cogent, and Cogent peered with Comcast. Since Netflix streams a huge amount of data in one direction, Comcast can reasonably argue that this is not a reasonable case for the usual peering agreements where it's assumed that data exchange is largely equal in each direction. Oddly then, what I read is that the actual problem with the "throttling" was between Cogent and Comcast, where the connection was saturated and Comcast wouldn't agree to uprate the peering connection bandwidth because they felt it was not a fair deal in both directions in terms of traffic.
What Netflix has done now - for better or worse - is to create a direct peering agreement with Comcast just like a regular customer would buy internet bandwidth, rather than through an SP-style peering agrement. And as I understand it, the definitions of net neutrality only cover what you do to traffic once it's on your network, and don't speak to the peering agreements and how you get the traffic on to it.
Now, where things would get interesting is if Comcast had agreed to let netflix locate their CDN devices within their network, which is really what Netflix wanted.