Comcast charges toll on competing online video provider Netflix. (Free market fail?)

[Tellos Athenaios]

End of the line ISPs like Comcast pay fees to Internet backbone providers like Level3 for carrying their traffic. Now, Comcast claims, Level3 is pushing more traffic onto Comcasts network than the other way around so Comcast wants to be able to charge Level3 a fee. That doesn't sound entirely unreasonable to me- but I'm interested in hearing more about it.

Sounds like Comcast has a problem with grown up talking to its suppliers. For Level3 traffic to use Comcast's hardware it implies that either Comcast idea of subnetting is so horribly broken that parts of Level 3 other clients fall under the same IP subnet in the Comcast network, (i.e. lazy staff forgot to make proper subnets); or it implies that Level3 is carrying so much traffic that Comcast's own routers advertise being cheaper nodes for such routes than the Level3 ones do. In the latter case Comcast is foolish if they seriously think they'll see long term money from it. To Level3, it is much cheaper to install additional hardware than let Comcast or other such ISPs cream their profits if this traffic is in any way significant.