It’s worth clearly pointing out here that Netflix is NOT the only application that has been experiencing issues through Cogent’s peering points with several providers. The bandwidth crunch at these peering points has been causing issues for all traffic passing through those specific points for many months (the first recurring complaints I’ve seen were back in June, and they’ve gotten worse since then).
It’s Comcast and Cogent’s responsibility to make sure they have enough capacity on the interconnects between their networks for their customers, and they both dropped the ball on this due to not coming to an agreement. But Netflix deciding pay Comcast for a direct connection instead of paying Cogent for the traffic destined to Comcast through a congested peering point is not a “bribe” to Comcast, it’s Cogent losing out on traffic they could be making money from.
