Lightning is not a netting system, -- as a clear evidence for that netting universally involves counterparty risk of loss and lightning does not. But if you wanted to talk in terms of netting you perhaps should have said that.
So it is a netting system without counterparty risk? Note that some parts of the traditional banking system also have mechanisms in place to eliminate counterparty risk (at least for practical purposes). See for example
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2331355 by Mancini et al, who show that the design of the European repo market is less vulnerable to counterparty risk than the American one. Generally, I don't think that the term "netting" implies that there must be a counterparty risk.