[vmarsy]

You might have a wrong definition of net neutrality. What the consumer-facing ISPs want is more something like tier levels: basic tier gets only 2mbps, platinum tier get 250mbps for instance (and other tiers in between) . So if I'm Spotify and I pay platinum , it is extorting other players, especially small ones as they can't afford paying platinum level. This is even more true if ISP decide that only one music app can be platinum, forcing all music services to bid for that platinum spot, raising the cost for it even more.

In the meantime, Backbone providers still provide Pandora, deezer, i<3 radio, and [new hot music startup, potentially more innovative than Spotify] at 250mbps to the consumer-facing ISP, but the consumer-facing ISP decided to create artifical scarcity and throttles those.

A theoretical counter argument would simply say: but in that case free market would penalize that ISP as consumers would choose a different one. But I think that's a naive answer because : some people don't see/know the issue, Spotify is good enough, as lycos search and MySpace were good enough at their prime. and more importantly it's a fact that 3 out of 4 Americans do not have a choice in high speed broadband provider. And for those who do, they're sometimes locked in because they still want that cable TV bundled with it. (hypothetically, This would be even more true if that bundle TV provided HBO at 250mbps where regular HBO would be deprioritezed because they didn't pay the platinum level, instead Netflix got it. HBO was business savvy enough to get prioritized via the bundle story.)