[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.