Stuff just behaves too strangely for it to be anything else.
One video provider will get slow. Switch to the mobile connection and it's fine. Switch to another site on the wired connection, that's fine too.
They've made it perfectly clear they're unhappy I won't pay them an extra $100+/month for 900 channels of crap over and over.
Your ISP is purposely providing a too-small link to your video provider. So when a lot of people are using that provider, it gets slow. When you switch to another provider, or a VPN, you get to use a fast connection to that other VPN that isn't overloaded, and then a fast connection back to your video provider.
This way your ISP can claim they are not throttling traffic because they aren't inspecting the packets for traffic shaping, they are just using physically poor connectivity to certain providers for traffic shaping.
I checked several of the largest ASNs and several smaller NYC-area ISPs on peeringdb and they are all "No" to the ratio requirement. Google doesn't care. Amazon doesn't care. Cloudflare doesn't care. There's half the Internet.
Demanding money to peer with Netflix is just trying to charge customers twice because they can. It's not normal, conventional, or good for the Internet. Netflix might be able to pay, but will your startup be able to pay? Probably not. And that's not the future we want.
Instead companies like Comcast are seeking to make profit from this.
But who's fault is any of this? I say you reap what you sow. Comcast has only themselves to blame when consumers are skeptical of them.
In this case Comcast is getting money from it's customers and then Netflix has to pay extra for the traffic Comcast's customers requested and paid for.
The end result was Netflix doing a deal to connect directly with Comcast, cutting out the middleman (IIRC).
This idea is nonsensical. What if I want to go to somewhere that is three times removed from my ISP. Comcast has zero capability to force some South Korean ISP that is providing services to some website to increase their bandwidth with their upstream who is peered with whoever owns the undersea cable that is peered with the company that peers with Comcast.
The alternative is that Netflix asks for 40 Gbps to Comcast and suddenly Comcast is obligated to provide 40 Gbps to every one of its customers.
What we've always gotten with an ISP is a given link rate to our ISP. Beyond that it's always been a crap shoot.
[0] https://drpeering.net/white-papers/The-Folly-Of-Peering-Rati...
So these ISPs should be bearing the costs of peering to backup providers, correct, by your logic? Or would that be the backup providers holding ISPs to "ransom"?
Apropos of anything else, ISPs (generally) provide massively asymmetric pipes. You can't provide an asymmetric pipe and then complain that data use on that pipe is, well, asymmetric.
I had to chose Comcast when I moved because the alternative could only handle HD streaming but not 4K. And then I'm paying half again as much to be able to watch a pretty movie while others are using the internet, or for several of us to watch shows on our own.
Comcast is getting paid for bandwidth, plenty.
This "rule" is too simple to game, to have ever been a functioning rule. Netflix could have just patched their app to constantly upload lots of random data. This would have killed ISPs who often expect mostly-down traffic profiles, but it would have evened out "the ratio" so it theoretically would have won the peering argument. Of course, Netflix never did this, which proves that this so-called rule never really governed anything.
If I were of a suspicious mind, I'd wonder if Rogers is pulling some backend shenanigans to discourage cord-cutting.
CEO: You know how we solve this, offer them more channels at a premium price. Which will show them 1 or maybe 2 shows they want to see.