content: You fail to understand the issue.  Netflix isnt refusing to paying anything. It pays for its pipes, and the end users pay for their pipes. And the people that supply them with service? They also pay for their pipes. ATT and others want to extract money from netflix because netflix is using their pipes; but those pipes were already paid for by others. Netflix---Provider A----Misc hops---ATT---Misc hops---Provider Z---You... ATT is asking to be paid by someone who isnt even a customer, and wants to treat traffic differently on a pipe someone already paid for. That is a power plant selling power to another power company, who sells it to netflix, and then demands that netflix pays them.  Netflix PAYS for extra bandwidth; they pay for their uplinks. What happens when that traffic goes out on the internet? Each pipe is already paid for by someone. There is no extra cost unless some asshole sold an over subscribed circuit.  Net neutrality does and has existed most of this time. Traffic was treated as traffic. Period. ISPs did not slow down particular ports, protocols, sevices, and sites. They were all treated equal. Whatever your uplink can support is what you can pass. And the idea that these places arent making money, where the fuck do you get an idea so fucken dumb? ATT, VZ, Comcast, Level3, etc are making a ton of cash. And if they werent, then it's not netflix who needs to pay more... It's those who pay for each of the pipes that connect that would need to pay more. Netflix would pay more to Provider A, and then provider A pays more for their uplinks, and so on. If you are the pipe in the middle you dont get to say what can flow across it and try to charge a toll like a filthy troll.