You could argue that, but Cogent is willing to provide the interconnect to its customer, Netflix. But what we're seeing is that the ISP that is selling internet to its customer isn't willing to provide sufficient bandwidth to meet their expected-but-not-contractually-obliged obligations.

They can do this because they have a monopoly on their customers. Not just a "Microsoft monopoly" where there are plenty of alternatives but network effects that keep people using Windows, but honest-to-god monopolies not just granted but ENFORCED by the government.

What we have here is a failure of the government to break the monopolies, revoke the monopolies, or police the monopolies. A little legislation that said "you can't oversell your bandwidth by more than X amount" would go a long way towards giving consumers an effective stick to beat their ISP with for over-promising* and under-delivering.

Note: The * is there to denote that they've written the contracts such that basically no matter what happens they're not in violation of them. We're only entering those contracts willingly in the sense that it's an abusive contracts from one of two or three vendors, or no contract at all. It's kind of like asking someone if they'd rather be beaten or stabbed. Given the choice; neither. If I have to pick one, how big is the knife?