The opposite of such a freedom is not that one party chooses to charge for some of its services, but that one party is prevented from offering such a service.
You mean a thing that has literally never happened anywhere in the US?
> The things Americans will frame as freedom of choice will continue to baffle me I guess.
I understand that you are frustrated with what is happening with this new legislation but it doesn't help you to make up smug fantasies about America just to make yourself feel better. Your energy would be better spent on your own knitting and maybe this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
This specifically may not have happened, but these things certainly did:
Is Netflix "prevented" or "not preferred". Let's pick our battle before we fight it.
But there is some useful grounding here. I use the term consenting adults, but perhaps we should refer to "legal entities". I think it is fair to start from a place where legal entities are allowed to enter into agreements with one another.
You are a legal entity. I am a legal entity. Netflix is a legal entity. Google is a legal entity. EI is a legal entity. (I have given the hypothetical ISP in your post a name, Evil ISP.)
There's my starting point. Would you like to continue a discussion about this? Please feel free to let me know if you disagree with anything above, and we can start there.
>Is Netflix "prevented" or "not preferred". Let's pick our battle before we fight it.
See, in my mind these two are, legalese aside, absolutely identical for the consumer. Legalese included I absolutely realize they are the same, why wouldn't they? It's just contracts between legal entities.
From the view of a society with states that govern and can, where it benefits or would otherwise hurt society, restrict what entities can put in their contracts I'd say that there are plenty of cases to be made for such restrictions (e.g. worker protections, access to elementary resources, ...).
I'm kind of hoping here that we have some common ground there. I feel like our point of disagreement is whether or not governments should be involved in the case of ISPs, right? My point there would be that if one legal entity (consumer) does not have a wide range of choice (ISP), there hardly is any choice to be had and one party can pretty much dictate the terms of their agreement (and a bunch of other arguments for net neutrality others formulated way better). This might really boil down to the question if we personally attribute some societal value to ISPs being a neutral player or pure infrastructure provider I'm afraid.
edit: formatting
So, I have a couple priors.
One of these priors is that it is, in general, a good thing to place as few restrictions on actors in society as possible. Not anarchy. Not mindlessly. Just as a general rule of thumb. Something that doesn't need justification on its own, but rather needs a case to be made to go against.
Another of these is that, in general, laws and regulations have costs. Enforcement carries cost. Also, we forego the things that are regulated against - rarely are these things pure evil. Sure, there are exceptions. Genocide is pure evil (though there is much room for compassion for those coerced into participating). This gets us down a rabbit hole quickly.
So, in general entities should be able to make deals. And adding to legislation that exists is costly (as in "bears cost").
The situation you describe sounds a lot like a monopoly. The nightmare scenario presented in net neutrality is typically "Netflix is blocked because Google paid more to let Youtube through". I think this is categorically different than "Netflix is now more expensive than Youtube is". Especially because the latter sentence is already true. We can disagree here.
The case is one of actual blocking. E.g. Google makes some exclusive deal with Comcast, where Comcast does not allow traffic from other streaming video suppliers. This is clearly anticompetitive, and we already have regulation to address it. Comcast and Google would both be blatantly in violation of anti-trust regulations and could be prosecuted. We don't need net neutrality to prevent this. Indeed, there are cases of wholesale blocking of this sort in the past that were dealt with by the FCC without formal net neutrality legislation in place. E.g. Vonage got blocked by an ISP that offered landlines; ISP got smacked.
So as I see it, we're left with the case of differential pricing.
So it seems to me that net neutrality addresses two primary concerns: true anticompetitive behavior and differential pricing.
In the case where services are priced differentially, but all are available, I honestly see very little difference to cable TV. And there seems no inherent reason that all traffic should carry the same price, as it is not the case that all traffic costs the same to an ISP.
So what might cause differential pricing? Sure, Google could pay Comcast to discount its services, but that's just a transfer. If Google pays Comcast to make it easier to get to us, well we're making that up to Google somehow. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Either we're paying with data and ad impressions, or it's baked into the subscription price.
If Google enters a contract with Comcast which has Comcast charge extra for Netflix traffic for no other reason than Netflix competes with Youtube, then we're back in an anticompetitive scenario and don't need net neutrality.
But it is reasonable that different traffic costs differently. If Comcast is offering its own streaming service, they can serve that entirely on their own network - no need to use any peering agreements or pay for bandwidth beyond their own infrastructure. If Youtube or Netflix comes from outside of Comcast's network (not always the case - Netflix subsidizes its traffic by offering streaming appliances to ISPs), then that traffic IS more expensive than Comcast's own content. This seems entirely reasonable to price differentially.
Ultimately, I would like net neutrality, and would personally benefit from it. Or rather, I would personally have my current state prevented from being negatively impacted, since net neutrality is largely the status quo. I do not fail to see this. But it is an argument that doesn't hold water with me (I am not saying this is your argument, simply that it is a common one).
So, I think we may be at a bit of an ideological impasse. If I interpret your response correctly, one of your priors is roughly "if we see an area where we think we can improve things through legislation/regulation, we should". My priors lead me to look askance at new regulation/legislation. I don't see why we need net neutrality, only why we might want it. For me, "need" is the threshold for legislation, not "want".
Let me know if I'm off on what I suggested as the two primary issues addressed, or if you have questions on where I'm coming from, or if I seem to be off on interpreting your stance.