Wifi works. People will not be very happy if you single-handedly break all their wifi-enabled things.
Your WiFi is slow ? Restart your computer, upgrade your operating system, clear your browser cache, move your router closer to you, buy a different modem etc. There is plenty of room for deniability that interference is the root cause.
Google is going to be pissed if their new wifi router doesn't work properly despite millions spent on testing, just because Verizon is screwing things up for everyone.
People will pile on, and the evidence that Verizon knows their technology can cause problems is already mounting. That they're pushing their products through without reviews or certifications could be seen as evidence of negligence or maliciousness.
What would be the cause of action? Why aren't the manufacturers of microwave ovens sued under the same cause of action?
If some product company (let's say, a router company) experienced some enormous increase in customer service and damage to brand image, I'd like to believe they'd eventually put quite a bit of money into finding out why they're losing money.
Could you imagine a world where a service rep has been instructed to ask whether a customer has any Verizon devices in the house? And to just give up, if they do, and blame Verizon? Would be terrible for Verizon's brand, pretty sure they're not ready (and probably don't want) to partition consumers who use internet-connected devices into pro-verizon and anti-verizon.
If you gradually deploy your non-solution while upselling them the cool new product, they won't even notice until it's too late.
I'm not sure about their zero-rating of audio streaming.
On the more universally reviled end of the spectrum, you have companies attempting to charge servers to pass traffic to their (also paying) customers.
On the nearly universally acceptable end of the spectrum, you have the widespread use of CDNs, or the Netflix and YouTube caching servers that they give ISPs for free.
Somewhere in the middle you have wireless ISPs offering free bandwidth to their users for use with popular services. Hard to get customers to see that as a bad thing, especially if they already use those services.
I was quite glad that the CRTC ruled against this practice in Canada. If telecoms want to run successful mobile television streaming businesses, they can start selling reasonable amounts of data with their plans.
People want bigger data plans more than they want Bell TV on their phones, so I think it got reasonable public support. Consumers groups widely applauded the ruling, at least.
First-party services fall in a different category; quite aside from net neutrality, that raises potential antitrust concerns.
But partnering with third-party services, especially if offering to do so with arbitrary third-party services, seems far less problematic.
Anti-trust law in the US is only relevant if the company has a monopoly.
That's exactly why net neutrality is important, and anti-trust law does not suffice. Because two competing ISP's both charging netflix to get the data you are already paying for to you, are not a monopoly.
(Notwithstanding that where I live Comcast is basically the only broadband option -- I still don't believe they have ever been legally determined to be a monopoly (yet?))
Most people live in a state of ignorant bliss.
1. We made something awesome in labs (by bending/breaking some traditional rules)
2. It's X% faster than traditional connections/has all these properties, let's get to market ASAP
3. Oh, in the real world, this tech doesn't play nicely with other tech because of how we built it
4. Maybe we can just muscle it through?
If the scale were smaller (let's say, developers on some widely used open source standard/code), this would have been a simple case of "oops, that's a bit shit, better get back in the lab and try to figure out a way to not trample other broadcasts, but keep the speed boosts we were proud of".