[walrus01]

ISP here: The difference is that a (properly run, ethical) ISP is actually neutral and is paid to carry the traffic. It's paying for a service just like paying $30 a month for a POTS phone line was in 1985. Building an ISP as an infrastructure service is a totally viable business model, it's not sexy like selling "big data" to advertisers as Facebook does, but it's a plain old fashioned exchange of money for basic services, just the same as you pay for your household electrical service, gas service, and water/sewer.

Running an ISP costs money just as any other critical infrastructure service is. If you get all the way down to the OSI layer 1 of it, it costs a lot of money. There's major construction projects involved. Go do the budgetary figures on what it would cost to acquire the right-of-way and run a new 864 count ribbon cable of dark fiber from Hillsboro, OR to Boise, ID, for example.

An ISP that doesn't fuck with its customers' traffic is simply a pipe to run your own choice of communications protocols on top of. The job of the ISP is to manage infrastructure at OSI layers 1-3, the 4-7 are your problem.