[paulddraper]

> already paid

In some cases. In other cases, it hasn't even happened yet.

> Are you really confused about this?

I'm not at all confused.

The ISP spends $X to build and maintain infrastructure for Y Gbps internet.

Mobile carriers do the same.

[acdha]

The ISP’s customers pay for their costs. The problem started when those ISPs decided they weren’t satisfied with 15-20% profit margins and started finding other ways to generate revenue like selling their customers’ activity data to advertisers, injecting ads, or by trying to get popular services to double-pay their operating costs.

You can tell it’s not a real barrier to the business in two ways: one is that it only affects MBA-infested companies - small ISPs and municipal broadband never seems to have a problem providing better service for less money – and the other is that they’re not asking their customers to pay more. If their cost of providing service had actually gone up, they’d have been open about that and own the claim that a few Mbps costs more than it used to despite all evidence to the contrary. Keeping as a back room deal lets them try to hide all of the details behind NDAs.

[OkayPhysicist]

Yes, and then they charge $Z dollars for a certain bandwidth allotment to each of their customers. It does not cost the ISP more money to route a MB/s to Netflix than it does to route a MB/s to Reddit.

[Cody-99]

>In some cases. In other cases, it hasn't even happened yet.

..? By the point ISP customers receive internet they have either already paid for the service, paid a deposit, or agreed to pay for it the following month like other utilities. In all of these cases by the time the user makes use of their service they have already agreed to pay for the internet service which includes data, hardware, and other infrastructure fees.

>The ISP spends $X to build and maintain infrastructure for Y Gbps internet.

EXACTLY. You are proving my point! The customer of the ISP has already paid for that. It doesn't cost the ISP any more money if I make use of my service by sending data to netflix, reddit, or whoever! If I watch netflix 12 hours a day it costs the ISP exactly $0 extra dollars. Asking me to pay more money or be throttled is ridiculous.

Hell, if you have one of the largest ISPs they pay nothing for any amount of data transfer over their networks anyway so your argument is even weaker lol.