no one is claiming everything is free .. there are costs involved in supporting any network which very much includes the final mile. again .. subscribers who are paying their ISP for broadband access is directly paying for those support costs. as subscriber base expands costs to support those extra folks also goes up accordingly.
Level 3 are offering to pay to upgrade connection points that's part of bottleneck. which has nothing to do with downstream network controlled by folks like Comcast and TWC. again .. those networks are already paid by subscription .. we should be able to access all of the bandwidth that we are paying for. Not just when content providers agrees to pay to toll to reach their paying customers.
I'm not sure why you're so intent on dodging the topic and doing copypasta. Peer link equipment isn't the downstream as you mention... it's the peer link. Anything on the other possibilities?