One solution would be for Netflix to modify their clients to send useless and quickly discarded UDP packets back to balance out the traffic. Verizon then has tons of data to push back to Level3 and everyone's happy.
That wouldn't work though. Verizon sells unbalanced services with larger download capacity than upload capacity. So it's simply not likely/possible that their customers can send matching data for what they are requesting. Additionally, while this might not negatively affect their FIOS customers their DSL customers are on asynchronous connections meaning that the uploaded data will negatively impact their ability to receive data at the same time in effect degrading their ability to stream and the quality of the video they can receive.
What DSL cusotmers have are asymmetric connections, not half-duplex. Even on ADSL, you can watch a HD video stream while uploading stuff. The only way the upload matters is if it prevents timely delivery of ACKs for the video being downloaded, and that's only a problem on the lowest speed tiers and when you don't have decent QoS.
Thanks for catching that error, as I typed out asynchronous I was saying to myself "this isn't right, the a is in the dang acronym" and then I was too lazy to double check.
So the client should just keep sending useless UDP traffic in the background even when the customer is not watching anything. I'm sure that can be evened out somehow :)
You could get it much closer to balanced. A good quality Netflix stream is 3Mbps down and probably only a few dozen kbps up. You just have to send some occasional bookkeeping data.
What if Netflix got that number to go up from say 30kbps to 500kbps? Still only 10% of upload speed link utilization on a 50/5 Mbps customer line.
Even if the ratio only went from 3:1 to 3:2 suddenly you're much, much closer to balanced. Takes a lot of wind out of their sails. Instead of "ZOMG THREE TIMES AS MUCH!" it's "FUCK IT'S 50% MORE!" which doesn't sound nearly as good.
