If Netflix were a good citizen, it would (a) let ISPs cache content; (b) pay them equitably for direct connections (smaller and more remote ISPs have higher costs per customer and should get MORE per account than Comcast, rather than receiving nothing); and (c) work with ISPs to develop updated technology that makes streaming more efficient. Bandwidth is expensive, and unicast streaming without caching is by far the most inefficient conceivable way of delivering "fat" content to the consumer.
I noted most of the discussion seems to point to Internet bandwidth as a cost factor to ISPs, but I wonder what's the impact of Netflix on access network costs ? They might be harder to measure or directly correlate to streaming usage, but for non-wired networks (which is usually the case in rural networks), this impact sounds more harmful to me than uplink costs. Rubens