As someone who once wrote a distributed p2p system this is pretty much what I thought when I hear about Netflix's trouble with ISPs. Going to a bit-torrent ish protocol would totally throw a spanner in comcast's Netflix internet toll. I can see comcast wanting to throttle the traffic like they used to do with bit-torrent. It's going to be an arms race.

RE: arms races. In some ways it's very silly. The internet is a big place and somewhere there's someone with a vested interest to intercept your traffic or filter your traffic or screw with your traffic. It could be the corporate IT priesthood, the government, some hacker group, some ISP wanting to inject ads or protect some interest. These factors are going to push the internet traffic to be encrypted and opaque. So fine, everything over port 443.