Isn't this just a CDN? ISPs quite happily host Akamai and Google nodes -- are they being paid for maintenance of those? Empirically, from an old job, the answer is no (in fact, we had to petition for quite a while to get some Google boxen), but that's in a country at the tail end of a long, long pipe. Is it different in the US?
People don't know how CDNs work so it looks amazing.
Comcast and Verizon now claim that Akamai is indeed paying them. Perhaps the outcry over Netflix being extorted explains why these deals have remained secret for years.
What this article is describing sounds like a colocation agreement which is a quite common service offered by ISPs and is typically paid for by a monthly rental fee calculated by storage size, dedicated bandwidth use and power consumption.
It's not the same. If I want Verizon to host my server, they have nothing to gain, but I do. So, yes, they should charge me. If instead they host a CDN server for a big content provider, they save money on routing content within their network.
That's not always the case though. Sometimes rack space is more valuable to ISPs than improving bandwidth efficiency via CDN co-location deals. It really depends how much space you've got to spare and who else wants it.
