The idea is further that, not only does it make pragmatic sense for so favorably positioned an ISP to act aggressively in defense of that position, but such ISPs have been observed to do so, as for example with AT&T's successful defeat of the recent municipal broadband expansion bill in Tennessee. AT&T's position is that taxpayer money should not be used to fund competition with private industry, which all sounds very fine and upstanding, except that the private industry has already stifled any possibility of competition by means of the sort of monopolistic activity which US governments spent much of the early 20th century working to restrict, in order to prevent the unsavory outcomes that such activity has been observed to produce in direct proportion to the degree in which it's successfully pursued.

So, sure, they can charge high rates for traffic if they want, in addition to charging more or less whatever rates they please simply to provision backhaul in the first place. They can impose a $20/month, or higher, charge for reliable access to video streamed from services other than those they themselves run. They can do whatever they're able to get away with - and in an environment of permissive and favorable legislation and no effective private competition, they get away with a hell of a lot.

In case it matters, I'm really not progressive, and I understand business reasonably well - I've been in private industry my entire career, with no one doing me any favors, and if I didn't have at least a generally accurate idea of how things work, I wouldn't be able to support myself. In particular, I find the current attitude held by the federal, and many state, governments, toward small business enterprises, absurd and execrable - and I've seen the onerous burden such an attitude inflicts on people who go into business for themselves. But the current attitude toward large business is a whole 'nother matter entirely, and I see nothing of value to our polity as a whole in the results of such gross permissiveness. Expanding such permissiveness still further strikes me as very much the wrong thing to do.