As an ISP, you sell your customers a connection to the Internet. To ensure these customers get the level of service they pay you for, it is your responsibility to make sure your network, including your interconnection points, have sufficient capacity to accommodate the data requests made by those customers. To try to shift blame to us for performance issues arising from interconnection congestion is like blaming drivers on a bridge for traffic jams when you’re the one who decided to leave three lanes closed during rush hour.
— Excerpt from a letter from Netflix’s general counsel David Hyman to Verizon general counsel Randy Mitch, rebuking Verizon for threatening to sue Netflix if it doesn’t remove a message that advises Netflix customers who have Verizon that Verizon is to blame for poor quality video streams.