> Netflix is sending a lot more than it's receiving, in which case their ISP needs to pay for peering.

All Internet traffic has more download than upload (for the end-consumer). This is literally why ISPs offer faster download speeds in end-consumer packages than upload speeds - they know that consumers will need to download more than they upload.

In vector calculus, this is known as divergence. Traffic on the highway has divergence of 0, meaning that if you draw a closed loop of any shape, over the course of a day/week, the number of cars crossing that loop in both directions (in/out) will be the same.[0][1] Internet traffic does not have zero divergence, because bits are interchangeable and easy to create, destroy, and copy (whereas cars and humans are not).

Comcast isn't dumb. They know this is the way the Internet works. They just also know that it's more profitable to pretend they don't and extort money based on a false definition of "equality".

[0] https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/just-what-does-it-mean...

[1] It's not exactly the same, due to births, deaths, and migration, but you get the idea.

Netflix is only sending the data at the request of Comcast's customers. Comcast is the company which created an asymmetric network such that their customers can request far, far more data than they are able to send. They are reaping the rewards of that decision. It hardly seems reasonable to expect that all the companies that Comcast peers with to have data flowing in equal amounts both ways since the design of Comcast's network explicitly prohibits this.

Trying to boil this down to "Netflix is sending a lot more than it's receiving" is to completely ignore WHY this is happening and really makes the debate useless. Symmetric (or nearly symmetric) peering agreements made sense when everyone had symmetric connections like modems, ISDN, T1, T3, etc.

When the majority of connections are not symmetric, it makes no sense at all.

Again, remember that Netflix isn't DOSing Comcast. Any packets that Netflix sends to Comcast's network was at the request of one of Comcast's (and Netflix's!) customers.

Uh no. Comcast's customers are requesting more traffic than they send. That is how residential asymmetric ISP services are specifically designed to be used. Netflix isn't the bogey man just because they offer a service consumers want and have already paid their ISP to deliver. If Netflix was split into 1000 smaller VOD services streaming the same traffic volume who would Comcast blame for having to shoulder the same burden?