Not entirely sure why this is such a big deal. Peering agreements happen all the time. Lots of large services peer directly with consumer ISPs because it's cheaper and more efficient than using intermediary transit.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Comcast is not throttling or discriminating traffic in any way (at least not publicly). This is a peering dispute settlement.

Does this affect competitors to Netflix? Depends on how much volume they have. If their volumes are low, they can still reliably use transit providers more economically. As their revenue increases, they'll need their own backbone network, but their ability to pay for it goes up too.

Is Comcast big, bad and evil? Probably. But not in this case. Comcast dealing directly with Netflix is good for both parties. They are entitled to charge Netflix to peer directly because most traffic is going to flow into Comcast's network from Netflix. They also probably had a case negotiating away from settlement-free agreements with Cogent for the same reason. Again, none of this is out of the ordinary, ASes negotiate peering deals with each other all the time based on the volume and direction of the traffic they exchange with each other, and this is all fairly unregulated.

Net neutrality is irrelevant in all of this, it only matters if Comcast actively discriminates between traffic at their end. This deal is not connected to the ruling.