I know you don't necessarily mean it this way but this sounds a lot like the cable companies' argument that it's "unfair" that the likes of Netflix can "push" all this data onto their network without paying.

Well someone is paying: the customer. Netflix isn't hogging anything. So ISPs want to double-dip and get paid at both ends but really what they want to do is protect their ailing TV businesses. It's naked protectionism, nothing more.

So to your comment: if customers can't get all this Netflix data then the ISPs have lied to them about the capacity of the connections they've sold. Or they're not charging enough (heh).