Imagine for a moment that we're talking about water service instead, and that we live in an alternate reality in which, due to accidents of history, the water network evolved much like our Internet, with peering and settlement agreements between privately owned water networks.
So, to borrow your words: you're paying your water service provider for a connection to their water network, but that doesn't make it their responsibility to pay to upgrade every intermediate water network on the way to every home what might need water -- even if water pressure drops every morning when everyone in town wants to take a shower.
Regardless of the technicalities, that doesn't seem right, does it?
Just as water service providers in that alternate reality would be responsible for making sure customers can pull enough water to shower every morning, ISPs are responsible for making sure their paying customers can pull the traffic for which they have paid.
But the problem here isn't that you can't fill your internet connection, period, but that you can't fill it with traffic from one particular endpoint. There is a bilateral aspect to the problem here that's totally ignored in your hypothetical.
Different example. Air Canada has an unlimited North America flight pass: http://www.aircanada.com/en/offers/air/wallet_na_faq/wallet_.... You can characterize this pass as buying you "unlimited travel to any destination in North America." Okay, so is it Air Canada's fault if you really want to go to Buffalo regularly, but you often have trouble booking a flight because of limited capacity at BUF? Does Air Canada have to pay for the airport upgrades? After all, it's their customers that want to go to Buffalo, and they're paying to travel to any destination in North America.
The bilateral arrangement here is between the ISP and an internet backbone - in this case, likely Level3. Level3 has stated that they are willing to split the cost of upgrading the link. Verizon is unwilling to do so. It's also useful to note that the cost of upgrading a link is tiny in the terms of these companies - on the order of $10-20k[1]. Netflix already pays to have sufficient capacity at their end of the connection; it is the ISP's responsibility to do the same, since their customers are paying to access whatever internet content they want. It is unreasonable to expect Netflix to pay for a separate, unnecessary connection. That's more like if the Buffalo airport decided they were getting too many flights from LA, so if anyone else from LA wanted to fly to Buffalo, they would have to pay for the addition of their own private terminal. It's not the way things are normally done, and it doesn't make sense.
No, the problem is that the ISP's network does not have sufficient capacity at that particular endpoint to receive the traffic pulled (and paid for) by its customers. The bottleneck at that endpoint is the ISP.
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PS. Travel is far too different to use in an analogy -- e.g., it doesn't involve delivery of continuous services to customer premises.
Your analogy paints the internet as a distribution system, with some fungible commodity (water, electricity) flowing from sources to sinks. That may be how Netflix uses the internet, but that's not how the internet is designed. It's designed to be a mesh, with nodes being peers to each other. The distributed structure of ownership isn't an accident of history. The internet was designed around that structure. Its much more like the hub and spoke airport system then a water distribution system. And as in the airport system, its not the sole responsiblity of the most popular destinations to pay to upgrade congested hub nodes.
Yes, my analogy paints the internet as a distribution system for a fungible commodity, because bits ARE a fungible commodity, just like water and electricity. A 1 is indistinguishable from every other 1, and a 0 is indistinguishable from every other 0.
In case it's not obvious, I agree that ISPs are NOT reponsible for upgrading infrastructure outside their network. What I'm saying is that ISPs are responsible for upgrading their network so it has sufficient capacity to receive the traffic pulled (and paid for) by ISP customers.
Imagine for a moment that we're talking about water service instead, and that we live in an alternate reality in which, due to accidents of history, the water network evolved much like our Internet, with peering and settlement agreements between privately owned water networks.
So, to borrow your words: you're paying your water service provider for a connection to their water network, but that doesn't make it their responsibility to pay to upgrade every intermediate water network on the way to every home what might need water -- even if water pressure drops every morning when everyone in town wants to take a shower.
Regardless of the technicalities, that doesn't seem right, does it?
Just as water service providers in that alternate reality would be responsible for making sure customers can pull enough water to shower every morning, ISPs are responsible for making sure their paying customers can pull the traffic for which they have paid.