Next up, net neutrality gone?
ugh I hope not. It will be a tragedy.
This what happens on the cable tv side. Content is king.
It'll probably end up like most people's cable bill: a large block of charges that are mostly not understood by most people.
Also keep in mind that most services don't actually want to charge the ISPs for access to their content, they just want access. Facebook doesn't want to charge your ISP to reach you reliably, nor does Netflix, they just want to be able to do it.
Given that ISPs aren't charities, yes - the cost will be passed on. And the first time a major ISP agents in a dispute about the charges and access is blocked, everyone will know - look at the various ESPN/cable/directv disputes over the years.
That is the future without net neutrality. The large ISPs will charge content providers. It will start slowly and only affect the largest services (like Netflix) but when they need to juice the quarterly numbers they'll start working their way down the list. Because we don't have competition in this country they will just start severely degrading traffic from anyone they want to make pay.
Pai has made no proposal for actual broadband competition. In fact he thinks we already have "robust" competition among ISPs: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/fccs-pai-br...
Comcast, Verizon and others have recently tried to turn this on its head by witholding peering upgrades to Netflix, who wasn't even charging them a dime for all this data that their customers requested! This is not net neutrality, and performance degradations like this made Comcast uncompetitive in my neck of the woods since I have Fiber available by rare happenstance. That being said, my fiber provider (Centurylink) has even worse peering with Comcast, such that loading xfinity.net is a chore on gigabit fiber, let alone the Xfinity Go app. These performance issues caused me to cancel my TV service with them and get a different provider that worked better on my kids tablets, and so long as providers play games to throttle eachother, stories like this will be common.