I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Here's the meat:

So even this robust, decades-old, reliable data center is still beholden to their internet provider actually providing net neutral internet traffic. If CenturyLink or Comcast decide to throttle Netflix again, there ain't dick the downstream ISPs can do about it.

If you have an end-user agreement, that agreement includes Comcast doing whatever they want to your traffic because you aren't negotiating, you're signing or not signing. If you're peering with Comcast as a Tier 1/Tier 2 business agreement, you're negotiating whether or not you're letting them shape your traffic and there's no advantage to Comcast to shape your traffic at that point.

This is a model Comcast knows - it's really easy to become a CATV provider if you've got, say, a nursing home. The price for a single lot of 100 ESPN subscriptions is less than 100 individual ESPN subscriptions. It's pennies, in fact. Comcast your ISP is a different animal than Comcast your peer; hell, Comcast your business internet provider is a different animal than Comcast your home internet provider (example: if I'm not getting 30/12 for my larcenous $135/mo they roll a truck because they fuckin' guaranteed it in writing. Now - they might very well decide to shape my traffic and there's nothing I can do about it... but it isn't in their best interests to do so because just looking at my flow-through (thanks, Ubiquiti!), only 20% of my traffic is video and that's with a family sitting and watching Netflix for 9 hours yesterday. I'm about 35% file transfer and about 20% encrypted data. If they try throttling my Netflix I'm going to drop below my 12 and they're in breach.

The rest of it is tort stuff - if ConEd nukes your fiber it's hardly your problem because you aren't the one on fiber. Vice appears to be meshing it up quite nicely; I can buy 100km microwave transmitters on Amazon Prime and redundancy is really fucking simple on Ubiquiti. And it's SOHO-grade shit.

I dunno. Vice seems to have done a pretty good job of being a successful business. I'm curious to see how easily they become a successful ISP. Remember - the cable companies got into it simply because they had the pipe. The pipe isn't really necessary anymore, at least not for last-mile shit.