Why YouTube gets stuck buffering so much

As you doubtless suspected, your ISP wants Google and Netflix to cough up, and bandwidth is their bat. [Ars]

Behind the scenes, in negotiations that almost never become public, the world's biggest Internet providers and video services argue over how much one network should pay to connect to another. When these negotiations fail, users suffer. In other words, bad video performance is often caused not just by technology problems but also by business decisions made by the companies that control the Internet.