in an attempt to force them to host their servers for free
These are the OpenConnect caching boxes, I assume? If that's the case, it's incorrect to say that Netflix "refuses to allow [...] caching", simply that they prefer to provide caching their way. As it stands, I don't see the problem with running Netflix cacheboxes instead of your own -- if you *were* running the cache, you would presumably need to pay for hosting anyway (and also machines), so I'm not sure how OpenConnect is worse. If there are reasons why OpenConnect boxes *are* inferior to some other solution (such as if they take up 20 times the power and space of an equivalent caching solution), then those are what need to be talked about.
One could make a somewhat valid argument that the “OpenConnect” caches are limited to caching Netflix and thus not very “open” whereas a cache that I was hosting for myself could cache a variety of content sources and not just Netflix. Would it really be plausible for a small ISP to host caching clusters for every streaming content supplier out there? Don’t get me wrong, I think that the access networks are the ones that are failing their customers in this scenario over all, but I can see this one valid aspect to the argument above. Owen