Can someone explain to me how it's evil for them to charge more money for a "bigger pipe"? Their networks can only service so much traffic; not sure why supply and demand are seen as evil in this case.
As a site owner, you pay a service provider (or cloud hosting service or whatever) to offer you a certain amount of bandwidth to host your site.
The problem comes when other ISP's implement their fast lanes and traffic from your site doesn't get equal priority to traffic from another site who has paid that specific ISP to prioritise their traffic when serving their customers.
So you end up having to pay multiple ISP's to prioritise your traffic on their networks. Your site could appear slow even if you've paid your own service provider for a high bandwidth.
The real issue is that we allow those ISPs to determine which semis are allowed to use a bypass. Public's ( even technologically advanced public's ) mixing of the two issues is why NN fight would continue to be lost.
To address your point, I do not see an issue for ISPs charging for PNIs as long as those charges are uniform. If I, JoesFlix, have 100Gbit/sec traffic to Comcast and Comcast says "In order to access EP-Bypass, traffic has to come from AS that has more than 90Gbit/sec traffic to us" then Comcast should not be allowed to prevent me from accessing EP-Bypass. Congestion is bad for business. Sane PNI rules are easy:
0. there's some access fee ( typically it is actually - you must show up in X places - how you get there is your cost )
1. we get even number of PNIs.
2. i order and pay for half
3. you order and pay for half
So you've got 30mbps internet? Sorry, Netflix is in the 256k lane so your speed doesn't matter. And this is Netflix's fault because they haven't paid us. Also Netflix costs $19.99 a month to cover the costs of paying your ISP. And now maybe your ISP wants to also charge you a premium on to of your normal bill to view Netflix.
It won't be a bigger pipe, this won't create a fast lane. It's just going to create a slow lane.
These companies are able to flaunt the laws of the marketplace by forcing consumers to pay more for a product despite the "physical good" becoming cheaper and cheaper every year for the ISP to produce.
That's basically what the ISPs want to do.
To keep things simple, imagine an ISP with only one plan: 1 TB of data/month at 100 Mb/second for $50/month.
Note that at 100 Mb/second it would only take 22 hours to use all your allotted data for the month. Because of this they do not have to build their network out to where it can handle everyone doing 100 Mb/second all the time. In fact, building it out to where it could do 100 Mb/second all the time would be prohibitively expensive.
So they just build their network out to where most of the time, most people get their 100 Mb/second, but during some peak times there may be congestion and things may slow down.
Imagine now that it is during one of those congested times. I am trying to watch a video lecture at a free MOOC. You are trying to watch, say, Netflix. Bob is trying to download a video game he just bought. Alice is trying to do a major OS and XCode update on her Mac.
You, me, Bob, and Alice all bought the same service from our ISP at the same price, so it seems pretty reasonable to expect that we would be treated the same. We should share the effects of congestion equally.
If the ISP wants to bring supply and demand into this, they could offer service level agreements for an extra cost. You pay a certain amount per month and they guarantee, say, 90% of rated speed even during congestion. I think this would be allowed under net neutrality.
What they want to do with paid prioritization, though, so go to the MOOC I'm trying to use, Netflix, the place where Bob got the video game, and Apple and say "Hey...if you pay us $X per month, when our network is congested we will prioritize the traffic for our customers of yours".
There are two bad things with this:
1. Suppose that Netflix buys paid prioritization, and nobody else does. That means that during times of congestion you get good service, and the service for the rest of us gets even worse. Even though we are paying our ISP for the exact same service, you are now getting preferential treatment because a company that has no relationship with the ISP other than they and the ISP have some common customers was able to pay to give you preferential service and degrade ours.
2. It may discourage the ISP from building out more network capacity as demand grows. They may instead focus on getting paid prioritization agreements from the most popular internet services. That could mean that those who use smaller services that even if they wanted to could not afford to make prioritization deals with every ISP, might be doomed to perpetual terrible performance, as the ISPs only need to build out their networks enough to provide good service to those who use services that have paid prioritization deals with the ISP.
Essentially ISPs want to reverse their role. Right now, their role is to sell to us (the end users) access to the internet. They want to turn that around, and make their role be to sell the internet access to us. And they still want to charge us while doing that...basically they want to be the pimps of the net, with us as the prostitutes and the websites as the johns.