Comment by DarkVanilla

> Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc

That is the dishonest spin put forward by the "last-mile" ISP providers.

The ISPs were already being paid by their customers in order to access the internet, but they wanted to leverage their natural monopolies in order to be paid twice, by whoever their customers were connecting to. Famously, the ISPs went as far as artificially throttling traffic in order to extort payments[1].

Framing this as a battle instigated by google and netfix is also the opposite of the truth. It was the ISP monopolies who brought this fight; not the internet companies. The battle was actually instigated by one of the last-mile ISPs, Verizon, suing the FCC.

> not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc

If anyone was going to pay for "transit to" the last mile ISPs, they would actually be paying backbone companies like L3, because those are the ones that actually move traffic across the internet.

[1] the throttling typically took the form of throttling certain backbone connections, so that no one would be able to prove they targeted Netflix specifically