There are two primary business models in intellectual property: 1) Establish a bottleneck and charge people to get through it. 2) Find an existing bottleneck and charge pennies on the dollar to eliminate it. Classified ads are (1). Craigslist is (2). AT&T is (1). Skype is (2). The New York Times is (1). Reddit is (2). If you're an ISP, you're (1). If you're Netflix or Youtube or Spotify or Pandora, you're (2). (1) businesses are old enough to have names like "American Telephone and Telegraph." (2) businesses are so new that their predecessors had extraneous "e"s and "i"s starting their names. Liberals favor (2). Conservatives favor (1). There will come a time when the guy who founded Napster will bid on Warner Music Group because fuck you, that's why but Team Trump's more of a Jammie Thomas mindset.
Pro-business is by definition antithetical to pro-consumer. I am not sure why more people do not understand that basic concept. My fav business name is The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, aka A&P, which used to be the largest US retailer but is now kaput.
2) Find an existing bottleneck and charge pennies on the dollar to eliminate it. Not quite... Craigslist fits that definition. The rest to are to a greater or lesser degree just cost shifting. Skype is piggybacking on other peoples networks, without piggybacking on at least some of ATT's network Skype wouldn't exist. Reddit is piggybacking on other peoples content. Youtube/Netflix are egregiously piggybacking on other peoples networks, to the point that they are generating a large percentage of the traffic (and cost). Niter could exist without someone putting down the "last mile" of fiber/cable/etc. Netflix is an especially egregious offender because it generates 37% of all internet traffic. If Netflix had to pay for the 37% of all internet traffic that it generates it would not exist as a company. Based on just pure percentage of use the $50 / month that I pay for internet $18 of that goes to cover Netflix and I don't even have a subscription. Remember when people complained about the $1 netflix increase? Try tripping the price, see what happens. I might add that $18 is probably conservatively low, Netflix has 25 million subscribers but 80million households have broadband so the 55million are subsidizing the other 25million. I'm not saying that net neutrality (to a point of maybe 1% of all total traffic) shouldn't be a thing. It would be a complete trainwreck (and probably break the internet) if every website had to negotiate individually for access to the last mile network providers. But do think that some of the serious offenders like Netflix/youtube/hulu should not be a blanketed under the net neutrality envelope. Remember you epic rant about Waze? well net neutrality as it currently stands lets those companies do the same thing with internet traffic and that's not necessarily a good thing.1) Establish a bottleneck and charge people to get through it.
Waze takes a common good and degrades it for the benefit of its customers. There is no fiduciary or legal agreement between Waze and the neighborhoods it destroys. Netflix et. al. take the agreed-upon financial agreement granted to a for-profit cartel and maximize their profits within that framework. The for-profit cartel then argues that the terms of their agreement aren't maximally profitable to them therefore they're going to renegotiate because they have a cartel and fuck you what are you going to do about it. To make your analogy make sense, the City of Los Angeles would have to suddenly decide that roads are a private good maintained by "service providers" who collect property taxes from homeowners and then start billing people who use the roads based on their mileage and usage. THAT is net neutrality.