Netflix's ISP and Verizon pay eachother nothing to exchange traffic (called peering).
Verizon wakes up one day and says, "Shit out of all the ISPs we peer with, Netflix and their ISP is responsible for 35% of our traffic, we have to do huge upgrades on the link to them, and they aren't paying us a dime"
That's my understanding of what is going on.
As an ISP, I think if you are offering 100Mbps unlimited in/out, you should Expect full thrust from every connection, or at least be capable of delivering that. I know it's not really realistic, they need to assume that some people, sometimes are disconnected but if I am paying for a connection and a certain level of throughput, I expect to get that.
Just my point of view, correct me if my assumptions are incorrect!
Thanks for replying (Linode is just an example)
Linode isn't an ISP, they still have to deal with ISPs for the end user, which is why it is different.