How Comcast became a powerful -- and controversial -- part of the Internet backbone

There’s no bigger Internet service provider in the United States than Comcast, and perhaps none is more controversial. Comcast has built a network that is a huge part of the Internet backbone in the United States.

Barry Tishgart, the vice president of Comcast Wholesale network services, argued that Comcast’s opponents are distorting the facts when they say Netflix’s payment to Comcast was unprecedented and when they claim that Comcast shouldn’t receive such payments because it doesn’t operate a “global” network that connects to every part of the Internet.

It was “frustrating” that “people made the deal between Comcast and Netflix out to be unprecedented or new, that a content company -- Netflix is an aggregation of a lot of content -- would have a deal with a Comcast, but in fact that's been going on for a long time, and it's also been widely reported,” Tishgart said.